Reception is a crucial stage in your child's writing journey. It's here that they begin learning how to form letters, write words and develop a genuine love for expressing themselves through writing. 

Our approach starts with building the essential physical skills children need to write. We focus on developing fine motor strength and control through fun, hands-on activities like Dough Disco, threading, and other creative mark-making tasks. These activities help children build confidence and control, ensuring they’re ready to make meaningful marks.

Once children are physically ready, we begin teaching letter formation using a cursive style. This early exposure supports smoother transitions into joined-up handwriting in Key Stage 1.

Our phonics-based writing journey begins with learning initial sounds, followed by middle and end sounds. This sequence enables children to begin writing simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, such as cat or dog. As confidence grows, we support children in building and writing captions. Before attempting independent writing, we spend time modelling and constructing captions together. This helps them understand sentence structure and meaning. Over time, children progress to writing simple sentences independently, applying their growing knowledge of phonics, vocabulary, and grammar.

By the end of Reception, our aim is for every child to feel confident reading and writing simple sentences — ready to take the next exciting steps in Key Stage 1.