At Aldermoor Farm, we use the ‘Ready, Steady Write scheme for English. Ready Steady Write offers afully-resourced, sequenced writing curriculum from Reception to Year 6, directly aligned with the National Curriculum standards for England. It emphasises high-quality, vocabulary-rich “Vehicle Texts” at the core of each unit—texts that engage pupils while connecting to wider subjects like Science, History, andGeography .
There are5 core elementsto the teaching sequence of writing:
- Immerse
- This stage builds background knowledge, engages pupils, and sets the foundation for writing. This stage involves Reading and exploring a high-quality Vehicle Text.
- Analyse
- This stage prepares children to write by showing them how good writing is constructed. This involves studying model text (WAGOLLs) that exemplify the target genre while looking at key grammatical structures.
- Plan
- This stage helps pupils to organise ideas, structure the writing, and make decisions about content, style, and vocabulary. Creating writing plans supports children to become independent, thoughtful writers.
- Write
- This stage includes writing in stages (e.g. introduction, body, conclusion) or as a full piece whilst giving pupils the opportunity to apply taught grammar, punctuation and vocabulary. Within these sessions, teachers model writing and there are shared writing activities.
- Review and Edit (often embedded in the writing stage)
- To reflect on and refine writing for clarity, accuracy, and effect. This allows pupils to make improvements to their work based on feedback and self/peer assessment
Sentence Dictation
Sentence dictation is a vitalcomponentof our English lessons at Aldermoor Farm. As part of a ‘Do Now’ at the start of English writing lessons, teachers dictate a sentence to pupils. Sentence dictation is a valuable in embedding spelling, punctuation and grammar in context as well as strengthening transcription skills to help build fluency in writing.
Spelling
Children are given a list of spellings to be tested on in school weekly. The spellings are also delivered in a once weekly taught session using ‘Spelling Shed’ resources. These sessions focus onetymology(word origins),morphology(prefixes, suffixes, and root words), andorthography(spelling patterns), helping children understand how words are constructed and why they are spelled the way they are.