We are so proud of our children's work and love showing it off at any given opportunity! Our classrooms and corridors are full of wonderful stories, poems and letters.

At Dalmain Primary School, we teach writing by following the Literacy Tree. Literacy Tree is a complete, thematic approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core. We are immensely proud that our school has been chosen as a Literacy Tree Flagship School for our innovative use of the book-based approach across our school.

At all ages, we have adopted an approach to writing that is based on children immersing themselves in a book, and discovering the world the author has created, creating strong levels of engagement with the themes of the book, before encouraging creativity and inspiring them to write.

How does it work?

Literacy Tree is an award-winning platform which has designed a curriculum which immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English. Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of diverse fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

As a whole-school approach, children explore at least 100 literary texts and experience over 75 unique significant authors as they move through the school. It provides complete coverage of all National Comprehension, literary language and spelling and grammar are taught through the context of the book and these skills are then applied rigorously in a variety of short and extended writing opportunities. All plans lead to purposeful application within a wide variety of written outcomes.

At our school, the Literacy Tree texts are mapped out to ensure progression and National Curriculum coverage across all year groups. You can find examples of our wide range of texts within our Curriculum Maps.

 

A highlight of our year is writing week, where the whole school comes together and respond to one writing stimulus, and of course we can't forget our termly Writing Laureate awards that recognise the children who are making excellent progress in their writing.