Writing 
Children at Downfield are taught to write through the teaching sequence for writing. Teachers carefully plan units of work where children become immersed in a genre or text type. They then gather the necessary skills to imitate and innovate their own pieces of writing within a particular style and for a particular audience.
Quality, topic-linked texts are at the heart of each literacy unit and children explore and engage with a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
The overview of literacy units can be seen on the main literacy page.
In order to develop an understanding of quality sentence structure, we use a consistent, school-wide approach. This uses a form of visual coding to indicate different clause types and associated conventions.
A yellow strip is used to indicate a simple, single clause sentence.
A green strip is used to indicate a coordinating conjunction. Here we can see it added between two single clauses to create a compound sentence.
A pink strip is used to indicate a subordinate clause. Here we can add it before a main or single clause, creating a complex sentence.
We encourage the children to explore and experiment with these structures building on their experiences and capabilities to reflect the requirements of the National Curriculum. Details of what this looks like in each year group, can be seen below. Classroom displays are used to reinforce these structures and their use is embedded across the curriculum.
Here are some of our classroom displays. These support the children in choosing sentence structure when writing across the curriculum.
