Year 2 Writing Curriculum at West Wycombe School

Our Year 2 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:  

• Plan or say out loud what I am going to write about. 

• Write down ideas and key words, including new vocabulary, when they plan. 

• Say what they want to write sentence by sentence. 

When drafting and writing a text:  

• Write narratives about personal experiences and those of others (real and fictional). 

• Write about real events. 

• Write poetry. 

• Show a positive attitude towards writing and develop writing stamina by writing for different purposes. 

When evaluating and editing a text:  

• Evaluate their writing with their peers and teacher and make simple additions, revisions and corrections as a result.   

• Re-read their writing to check that it makes sense, particularly that verbs have been written in the correct tense: past (I walked), present (I walk), future (I will walk) and continuous forms (I was walking/I am walking/I will be walking)    

• Proof-read to check for errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. 

• Read aloud what they have written using appropriate expression to make the meaning clear. 

Vocabulary, Grammar and Punctuation:

Build nouns by adding suffixes like -er and -ness e.g. run to runner and lonely to loneliness.  

• Build nouns by combining words e.g. super and man make superman. 

• Build adjectives by adding suffixes like –ful and –less e.g. help to helpful or helpless.   

• Be more detailed in their description by adding suffixes like –er and –est e.g. longer and longest. 

• Be more detailed in their description of action by using adverbs e.g. He ran along happily 

• Join two sentences together using a conjunction such as or, and, but, when, if, that, because. 

• Be more detailed in their description of people, objects and ideas by using expanded noun phrases - the blue butterfly, the three little pigs. 

• Write different types of sentences such as a statement, question, exclamation or command.   

• Use the present and past tense correctly and consistently in their writing. 

• Use the progressive present and past tense to describe things that are or were just happening e.g. ‘She is drumming.’ and ‘He was shouting’. 

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

• Use commas to separate items in a list. 

• Use apostrophes to mark where letters are missing in spelling. 

• Use apostrophes to show singular ownership; for example, the girl's arm, the chair's leg, the mind's eye. 

Spelling: 

• Spell by segmenting spoken words into phonemes and then representing these using graphemes, spelling many correctly. 

• Learn different ways to spell the same phoneme and learn some words with each spelling in, including some homophones. For example, maid and made. 

• Spell common words that can't be segmented such as because, could and their. 

• Spell more words in their contracted forms. For example, aren't, I'll and it's. 

• Spell words using the singular possessive apostrophe. For example, the cat's cheese, the table's leg, the mind's eye. 

• Use suffixes such as –ment, –ness, –ful, –less, –ly to spell longer words 

• Apply the spelling rules from English Appendix 1. 

Handwriting:

• Write lower-case letters to the correct size relative to one another. 

• Start using some of the diagonal and horizontal joins and understand which letters are best left un-joined. 

• Write capital letters and digits of the correct size in relation to one another and to lower-case letters. 

• Use spaces between words that aren't too big or too small.