At St Mary's, we aim to engage our children in a wide range of writing tasks and styles in order to inspire them to become keen, creative writers. Below you will find some information on how you can support your child at home with their writing. 

 

Literacy Shed

https://www.literacyshed.com/home.html

Literacy Shed is a great resource for both reading and writing - it shares lots of stimuli for writing, including video clips.  You may want to let your child explore this site themselves or choose a featured activity for them to have a go at if you're looking for inspiration.

Top tips for helping your child develop as a writer:

1) Give writing a purpose - ensure that, if you are asking your child to have a go at some writing, it has a purpose to it.  For example, they could write your weekly shopping list, send thank you letters to friends or family or even write up their favourite recipe to send to someone of their choice.  Giving writing a purpose allows children to see it's importance. 

2) Make writing special - Really? Yes! - this can be done by following a few simple steps.  Firstly, allow your children to choose what they write with (perhaps a special pen or pencil of their choice).  Secondly, allow children to make a physical space for their writing - this might be a desk or a corner of the kitchen table that they can make their own while they carry out their writing activity. 

3) Model writing for your child - sometimes, we may not feel like we are able to model perfect writing for our children but it is important that we try to allow them to see us as writers too!  This could mean that we spend time writing together with them or, when they are doing their home learning or another writing task, we support them with sentence starters/ideas for words they could use.