Year 1 Writing Curriculum at West Wycombe School

Our Year 1 writing curriculum is designed to equip students with the skills they need to become proficient and confident writers. By focusing on key skills and competencies, we ensure that our students meet the expectations of the national curriculum and develop into the type of writers who can effectively communicate their ideas and engage their readers.

Key Skills covered:

Composition

When planning a text:

• Say out loud what they are going to write about.  

• Say a sentence before writing it.  

When drafting and writing a text:  

• Order sentences to make a short story.  

When evaluating and editing a text:  

• Re-read what they have written and check that it makes sense.  

• Discuss what they have written with their teacher, their parents and other pupils. 

• Read their writing clearly enough to be heard by their peers and the teacher. 

Vocabulary, Grammar and Punctuation:

• Use the regular plural noun suffixes –s and –es e.g. dog to dogs but wish to wishes.  

• Add common suffixes such as -er, -ed and-ing to verbs where they do not need to change the spelling of the verb e.g. help to helper, helped or helping.  

• Use the prefix -un to mean the opposite of the root word e.g. kind to unkind and happy to unhappy.  

• Combine words to make sentences.  

• Join words and clauses using 'and.' 

• Order sentences when writing short, simple stories.  

• Separate words with spaces. 

• Begin to use capital letters at the start of a sentence and full stops, question marks and exclamation marks at the end.  

• Start names and the personal pronoun 'I' with a capital letter. 

Spelling:

Spell words containing the 40+ phonemes that they have been taught.  

• Spell words that can't be segmented such as the, once and I.  

• Spell the days of the week.  

• Name the letters of the alphabet in order. 

• Use letter names to discuss different ways of spelling the same sound e.g. 'ai' and 'ay'.  

• Use the spelling rule for adding –s or –es to words.  

• Use the prefix un– to spell words.  

• Use  –ing, –ed, –er and –est to spell words where there is no change to the root word e.g. 'help' becomes 'helping, helped, helper.  

• Apply the simple spelling rules from English Appendix 1. 

• Write from memory simple sentences dictated by the teacher.  

• Understand that words are divided into 'beats' or syllables. 

• Distinguish between homophones and near-homophones e.g. made and maid.

Handwriting:

• Sit correctly at a table, holding a pencil comfortably and correctly. 

• Begin to form lower-case letters in the correct direction, starting and finishing in the right places. 

• Form capital letters. 

• Form digits 0-9. 

• Understand which letters belong to which handwriting ‘families’ (ie letters that are formed in similar ways) and can practise these.