At St Peter’s, we believe in equipping our children with the tools, knowledge and skills to be the author of their own life stories and change the world for the better. Because of this, Writing plays a significant part in our curriculum. We believe that Writing has the ability to inspire, entertain, motivate, change lives, change minds and even change history. 

In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality stimuli – mostly through a range of classic and modern texts carefully chosen for each year group. Over their time at the school, children will experience writing in a variety of fiction and non-fiction styles, with a particular focus on writing to inform, persuade, discuss and entertain.  

All of our units of work begin with getting the children hooked into the text. This may involve reading and discussing the text, and unpicking its purpose, structure, tones, ideas, themes and tropes. We also ensure our pupils understand the context of the text in both place and time. The aim of this is to ensure our pupils have the world and word knowledge required to understand the text and prepare them to write.

We then teach a repeated cycle of input, writing and review. This involves providing the pupils with input on the content, vocabulary and grammar they will need to employ in their writing and, after creating a writing toolkit, getting the pupils to practise it. They then apply it to their writing alongside teacher modelling, a constant review of how successful they have been, with time to make revisions. Our philosophy is that our pupils should write less, more often.

Our final piece of writing in each unit is typically independent. The main goal of this is to ensure the pupils are confident in applying the vocabulary, language patterns and text features taught. This piece of writing, once it has been revised, is normally always published. Nothing is finished unless it is excellent.

If you would like further information on the curriculum we teach, please contact the school directly.