Writing

Literature plays a central role in how we shape our writing curriculum, with a book or text being the stimulus for writing. At Cannon Lane we use the principles of Big Writing to teach writing. This means that each week, children will focus on a specific genre with a purpose whilst developing their skills and the writing voice. This is applied and celebrated in a piece of extended writing. 

Throughout the school, we have a focus on 'WOW words'. This means that children try to use and understand ambitious vocabulary in their writing and also across the curriculum. As children, progress throughout the school, we also focus on VCOP (Vocabulary, connectives, Openers and Punctuation) to develop their writing skills. Writing at Cannon Lanes uses the Talk for Writing structure of imitate, innovate, and invent to support all our learners. Throughout the school, writing is taught, where children are immersed in a text type (either fiction or non-fiction) by looking at key features, vocabulary, and example texts.

At Cannon Lane we believe that reading is the best teaching of writing and therefore our writing and reading teaching goes hand in hand. Through this model the children are exposed to high quality, challenging texts which aim to stimulate and improve their vocabulary, comprehension and understanding of the English language. The children are taught to write with clarity, and awareness of the audience, purpose and context, as well as an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. We use high-quality, diverse books as the stimulus for our writing, which allows the children to use the language that they hear in the stories and books that we use in our guided reading sessions and story times.