Writing
Getting Ready to Write
Did you know, throughout their time at Templemoor, your child’s hands will go through huge physical changes? To be a successful writer, your child must develop their core and upper body strength, as well as strength in their fingers and hands. The visuals below show some of the activities your child may take part in in our early years setting and why these activities are so important. Completing these activities at home will mean your child’s writing journey will get off to a fantastic start!
Developing a comfortable pencil grip
Developing a comfortable pencil grip takes time and, as explained above, many different activities, totally unrelated to holding a pencil can help with this. The graphic here shows some of the stages your child may go through.
Early Letter Formation
Through phonics lessons and within provision, children are taught to form letters using the Read,Write,Inc phrases. For example, around the apple and down the leaf. When writing at home, encourage correct letter formation using the rhymes listed here.
When the magic begins to happen….
Once your child has learnt to read and write just a few letters the world really begins to open up as they learn that they are able to communicate their ideas in written form. Children are able to ‘Fred talk’ words and use red word mats to build their own captions and sentences- for more information on this, please see our reading and phonics page.
As children’s skills develop, so too do their ideas. Sentences become longer and more complex and children learn to put these together in a logical sequence to form both fiction and non fictions texts. By the time children leave us in Year 2 they are competent writers using a range of sentence types and ambitious vocabulary.
One way to help your child with their writing at home is to read, read, read! The most confident of writers are often avid readers or have many books shared with them at home. Immersing children in high quality texts is an excellent way of developing vocabulary and sentence structure and this is exactly why our English curriculum is taught through carefully selected books.
To encourage children to reflect upon their own writing, marking symbols are used to identify key parts of the text.
For more information regarding writing progression, please see the documents below.
