Writing

At St Mary’s we believe that all children are entitled to a broad and balanced English curriculum that allows them to maximise their learning potential; preparing them for the application of writing skills across the whole curriculum and life beyond education. The intent for English is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment that they can then apply to their own writing. 

Early Literacy​

In our Reception class, we have introduced the use of Greg Bottrill’s Drawing Club to form part of our Literacy lessons along side high quality texts.

Drawing Club allows us to open up the magic world of tales and story to children whilst at the same time enriching their language and vocabulary, developing their fine motor skills, and building upon their application of phonics. Drawing Club is a highly creative approach that immerses children into a world full of imagination where anything can happen and often does!​
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Drawing Club is a true adventure. It is based on a perfect mixture of picture books, tales, and animations. The approach involves time together as a whole class on Carpet Kingdom, followed by time spent with children exploring their own ideas and creativity. Drawing Club puts us, the creative teachers, back at the centre of our teaching, allowing us to have the freedom to adventure and effectively bring the world of stories to life! 

Following the success of Drawing Club we are now introducing Greg Bottrill’s ‘Scribble Club’ in Nursery, which has been created to support the development of children’s early mark-making skills and elements of Shonette Bason’s ‘Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle’ Early Writing programme.

Scribble Club allows the teacher to model and invent scribbles within co-play to engage children in purposeful scribbles, creating adventure, story, magic and dreaming in a way to link the real world to their world. This will support the starting point for drawing club and the message centre when children entre Reception.

We use the programme as a way to support the beginning of our children’s writing journey. We use dance and big movements to develop the children’s fine motor control, needed for writing. We start by holding a flipper flapper (small pieces of fabric) in each hand whilst dancing along to music and following the teacher’s instructions. Some of the movements involve moving our arms up and down, side to side, in large circles and in wiggly lines. We then transfer these moves on to paper. The children swap their flipper flappers for two thick pens and repeat the movements whilst making marks on paper.

As the children become more confident with the marks they are making we then begin to use the marks/scribbles to create a drawing that is related to what we are learning. For example, if we are learning about ‘mini beasts’ we will use our flipper flappers and large pens to practice the skill of drawing a wiggly line before drawing a picture of a wiggly worm. These sessions are great fun for the children but also means that our children become confident mark makers!​

Building on the success of Drawing Club we are now introducing Greg Bottrill’s ‘Message Centre’ to inspire and ignite child-initiated writing and mark-making.

The message centre enables our children to explore the joy of messaging, an approach to sprinkling extra joy over the top of their day, showing them how reading, writing and mathematics can be hidden in and around their room and outdoors too. Our children love hiding and finding – think pass the parcel, birthday presents, egg hunts and hide and seek. There is a buzz to be had, and it is this buzz that the Message Centre approach has at its heart.

Secret Symbols: We love creating secret symbols together in EYFS. A secret symbol can have many powers and creates no limits to your imagination. Teachers and children can create secret symbols to build on their play and create a sense of magic! We might hide a secret symbol in our shoe to make us run really fast or we might draw a symbol that sends a rocket that we have just built.