During our Spring term, school have been working hard to further emphasise the importance of handwriting up and down school. We have seen an increased distribution of pen licences through school which is fantastic. This signals that are children are working really hard to master the correct letter formation and joins needed to write legibly. 
We have also added an additional celebration to the end of our Golden Book which features a class each week fetching in samples of handwriting to be proud of. To ensure that our children are applying their handwriting skills at all times this could be from any area of the curriculum. Keep up the hard work Park Street, we are proud of your efforts!

Over the last half term, the children in nursery have been working really hard to develop their mark making skills. 
Fine motor skills are very important in building the strength and control needed for writing and we have had lots of opportunities to practise these in our funky fingers area. 
In the writing area, we have been learning to hold our pen or pencil in a tripod grip and add more pressure to the paper. We have been working on making different patterns including zig-zags, circles and lines going up, down and across. Some children are getting really confident with writing their name and we are encouraging them to write it on their creations to give lots of practise. Everyone is able to find their own name card and have a go at writing the first letter. 

Team CW are working hard developing their fine motor skills and handwriting. One of their favourite activities is Dough Disco! Every week during provision time they take part in fine motor skills activities to develop their handwriting during indoor and outdoor provision. The class have been writing in our Read Write Inc phonics sessions. They have been learning to write Set 1 sounds in words and some of the class have been writing special friends sounds in words from Read Write Inc. Rainbows have been working hard to read what they have written by pointing to each sound and blending them together, and have been able to “fix” and change words if they haven’t quite got them right the first time. Some of the children have also been learning to “hold a sentence” in their head before they write by saying it several times to help them remember it. After writing it, they children have checked their sentence to see if it makes sense. Reception like to write during provision activities too! They have written shopping lists for Grandma from Little Red Riding Hood, “wanted” posters for the Gingerbread Man and labelled drawings of houses and wolf traps for the Three Little Pigs. 

This half term, Team LL and AF have been working really hard to develop their skills in writing. They have spent time completing descriptive written work linked to their history theme about the Ancient Egyptians.  The class have used their residential trip to  Robinwood as a stimulus for writing and have been busy developing diary extracts from different perspectives thinking carefully about vocabulary choices and levels of formality. The teams have also been writing to persuade. Both classes loved welcoming parents to their writing workshops where they developed persuasive adverts to encourage tourists to visit the nature reserve. In addition, Year 6 have been developing their use of homophones – ensuring accurate spelling and appropriate use. There has also been a focus on punctuation where the class have been learning how to use colons, semi colons and hyphens accurately.

This term, Team AC have been working really hard to develop their skills in writing. They have spent time completing work linked to their book ‘The Tunnel’. The class used grammatical devices such as expanded noun phrases in their writing to describe a familiar setting. The team also worked on their use of senses and thought of appropriate adjectives to help give detail to our writing. They were able to develop this further and get a real sense of setting during the class' parent writing workshop day where the children visited the nature area so that they could collect adjectives and nouns, linked to senses, that could be used when writing their own setting description. Team AC have also thought about how it would feel if they were one of the characters in the book the Tunnel and wrote a diary entry from their point of view. To help with this, the class decided that their writing needed to show past tense verbs and not only recount events but also use language to help describe how they might feel throughout their days’ adventures. As a class, the focus is now on looking at non-fiction books to see how the language used in these books compares to fiction texts. 

This half term, Team HG have been completing work linked to their text driver: Amazing Evolution. They learned about natural selection and how DNA is passed on to decedents. The class looked at the lives and achievements of Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace and Mary Anning and wrote persuasive speeches to encourage the public to give them recognition, using techniques such as rhetorical questions, exaggeration and lists of three to achieve this. Team HG worked on their use of ambiguous language and relative clauses as well as differentiating facts from opinions in order to make their opinions sound like facts.  
The class are currently researching animals that Darwin and Wallace may have encountered on their journeys and writing non-chronological reports about them. The children are focussing on organisational and presentational devices and cohesion throughout their writing.  

Team JF have been busy holding the class' creative writing workshop where they have welcomed parents into the classroom. Outcomes for the session were linked to the National Curriculum guidance for their year group. In Team JF, the creative writing centred around a piece of descriptive writing after their trip to the nature reserve.  Back in class, the children focused on the use of adjectives and expanded noun phrases to ensure they were able to create vivid descriptions including all of their senses. Staff in Team JF commented that it was great to welcome parents and carers in to see the amazing work children in the class can produce through careful modelling and that parent support really motivated the children in their writing outcomes.

'During the Spring term, Team JF have been working incredibly hard to develop their writing. They have spent time focusing on a non fiction book ‘The Big Book of the Blue’. The class had great fun exploring many different sea creatures and finding out the most interesting facts! From this, they decided they would write their own fact files of a sea creature we found fascinating! In order to do this, the class worked hard to develop our writing skills exploring the suffix -ly to describe the movements of sea creatures and the use of apostrophes for possession when describing the creatures' attributes.