Year 5 Writing Curriculum at West Wycombe School

Our Year 5 writing curriculum is designed to equip students with the skills they need to become proficient and confident writers. By focusing on key skills, we ensure that our students meet the expectations of the national curriculum and develop into writers who can effectively communicate their ideas and engage their readers. 

Key Skills covered:

Composition

When planning a text:  

• Say who they are writing for and what they hope to achieve, using similar writing to help them choose appropriate vocabulary, grammatical devices and layout. 

• Make notes and develop their ideas, using their reading and what they have researched to help them. 

• Use their reading and knowledge of what real authors do to develop characters and settings in narrative writing. 

When drafting and writing a text:  

• Select grammatical devices to enhance the meaning of their writing.  

• Select words from a reasonably wide vocabulary that create a particular atmosphere or effect. 

• In narrative writing, combine description of setting and character with dialogue that advances the plot. 

• Attempt to summarise longer passages. 

• Use a wide range of devices that help their writing flow and make sense within and across paragraphs. They do this, for example, by using topic sentences and adverbial openers.    

• Use headings, sub-headings and bullet points to lay their writing out and guide the reader. 

When evaluating and editing a text:  

• Assess the effectiveness of their own and others’ writing. 

• Suggest changes to vocabulary, grammar and punctuation that enhance the effect or clarify the meaning of their writing. 

• Check for consistent and correct use of tense throughout a piece of writing. 

• Check that the subject and verb agree when using singular and plural nouns; for example, 'The dog barks at the postman' vs 'The dogs bark at the postman'.  

• Distinguish between the language of speech and writing, and can choose the appropriate register. 

• Proof-read for errors in spelling and punctuation. 

Vocabulary, Grammar and Punctuation

• Use sentence-level grammar. 

• Add extra details efficiently using relative clauses for example: Mr. Dean, who is the maths teacher at their school, ran away and hid!   

• Show how possible something is using words such as perhaps or surely or by using modal verbs like might, should, could and must. 

• Use a range of devices to build cohesion in a paragraph and make their writing flow. 

• Link ideas across paragraphs. To do this they may use adverbial phrases such as 'Later that evening...', 'Nearby...' or 'Finally...' or may make choices about tense. 

• Use brackets, dashes and commas to add extra, non-essential information. 

• Use commas to clarify meaning or avoid ambiguity. 

Spelling

• Use suffixes like -ate, -ise and -ify to change nouns into adjectives.  

• Use prefixes like dis–, de–, mis–, over– and re- to change the meaning of verbs.  • Use further prefixes and suffixes and understand the guidelines for adding them. 

• Spell some words with silent letters like knight, psalm, solemn. 

• Distinguish between homophones and other words which are often confused. 

• Use knowledge of word meanings and the origins of words to help with spelling and understand that the spellings of some words just need to be learnt. 

• Use dictionaries to check the spelling and meaning of words. 

• Use the first three or four letters of a word to check spelling, meaning or both of these in a dictionary. 

• Use a thesaurus. 

Handwriting

• Write legibly, fluently and with increasing speed by choosing which shape of a letter to use when given choices. 

• Decide whether or not to join specific letters as they develop their personal style. 

• Understand that they might use different handwriting when writing a quick note and writing up in best. 

• Choose the writing implement that is best suited for a task.