St Margaret Mary's Catholic Infant School

Writing

Writing and reading are part of every aspect of your child’s life and, while children do lots of literacy based activities at school (e.g. writing, reading, handwriting, phonics), there are lots of ways that you can support your child at home. This booklet aims to give lots of suggestions and ideas for making writing fun and meaningful at home and improving achievement levels at school.

General Tips and Ideas

The basis of all good writing is good talk. Writing depends on knowing lots of words and being able to join them together in interesting ways. Good writing has direct links to reading and a range of reading experiences.

Encourage your child/children to:

Explain a game or activity, describe a person, place, picture or thing, retell stories talk about things they have done (e.g. visits, day at school). Encourage detail in answers or descriptions, predict what might happen next in a story, TV programme or sequel to a film, play or word games.
Be a reading model and read to your child (e.g. stories, poems, factual information (such as timetables), magazines, newspaper reports, letters, emails, adverts, instructions). Discuss the ways authors use words to shape their ideas.
Read yourself. We have books in the school reception that you can borrow.
Be a writing model and encourage your child to write alongside you for real purposes, e.g. shopping lists, birthday/Christmas lists, labels, invitations, thank you letters, emails to friends, postcards, cards for relatives, scrap books of holidays/hobbies/special events, diaries, posters for real events, short stories or poems for family members, menus, texting, bedroom or house rules.

Letters and Sounds (Phonics)

Phonics refers to the sounds letters make on their own or in combination with other letters. The school’s chosen approach to phonics is through teaching ‘Letters and Sounds' using the planning from Language Centre Publications (LCP). From their first day in nursery, the children will be encouraged to listen to the sounds in words and will begin to link these sounds to letters. This is an important aspect of learning to read and is taught daily throughout the school in class groups, small groups and, sometimes, individually. If your child joins our school family in reception, they will begin their phonics journey on their first day of school.