We’re delighted to announce that we’re collaborating with HFL Education and UK Literacy Association’s School Of The Year Elmhurst Primary School to bring you our new training: Getting Writing Right: What the Evidence Says.
Join us for a day of learning!
About this course
Held at Elmhurst Primary School in London, this training will equip teachers and leaders to understand what the latest evidence and research concerning quality writing teaching is.
The day will consider how schools can ensure that all children make maximised progress in writing. The essential features of writing teaching will be discussed, such as:
How to set rigorous writing goals
How to plan a class writing project with the greater-depth standard as the standard
What’s involved in delivering an effective writing lesson
How to deliver sentence-level and grammar instruction
How to connect reading and writing profitably.
Learning Outcomes
Have a secure understanding of what the evidence and research says around effective writing teaching
Be given practical ideas and strategies for writing teaching to use in the primary classroom immediately
Be equipped with greater confidence and subject knowledge concerning the teaching of writing
Additional Information
09:30 – 15:30 – 16/10/2025
Lunch & refreshments will be provided.
Schools will also receive a school license (worth £54.75) to our latest eBook How To Teach Writing.
In the early stages of learning to write, particularly in Reception and Key Stage One, it can be tempting to push for ‘extended writing’ as a sign of progress.
Extended writing, often characterised by multi-paragraph pieces, is undoubtedly important later in schooling. However, compelling evidence suggests that asking very young children to produce overly long texts can actually undermine their writing development.
At the same time, this does not mean we should abandon writing at the whole-text level. In fact, composing complete texts, however short, is essential.
The key is finding the right balance: prioritising quality, purpose, and coherence in children’s writing over sheer quantity for quantity’s sake.
Why extended writing isn’t the goal (Yet)
Children in Reception and Year One are often still developing their transcription skills: letter formation, handwriting fluency, encoding, and early spelling. Until these transcriptional foundations are secure, children won’t be able to compose their best texts. When transcription is effortful, children’s cognitive resources are disproportionately consumed by forming letters and encoding words, leaving them with limited capacity for composing at length
Writing is an inherently complex process that draws on multiple skills simultaneously. According to The Science Of Writing, children’s working memory can quickly become overwhelmed if they are expected to juggle handwriting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and idea generation over extended pieces. This cognitive overload can lead to frustration, poor writing quality, and even writing avoidance (see Motivating Writing Teaching for more on this).
Why whole-text writing still matters
Text-level understanding from the start
Crucially, not expecting extended writing in Reception and Year One does not mean avoiding text-level work. Research stresses that writing should involve an awareness of purpose, audience, and composing at a text level. For example, writing 4-8 sentences as part of a picturebook project constitutes writing a whole text. See these articles for more on the book-making approach:
Early writing development and our book-making approach [LINK]
Whole-text teaching helps children learn to compose sentences with coherence, to sequence their ideas, and to consider how sentences work together to create a collective meaning.
The power of composing short texts
Research shows that composing short texts is one of the most effective things a teacher of early writing can do (LINK). Writing a handful of well-structured linked sentences:
Allows meaningful discussion about beginnings, endings, sequencing, text structures and cohesion.
Acts as a bridge between sentence-level grammar and producing longer compositions later on.
Encourages children to plan, compose, revise and proof-read on a manageable scale.
Ensures children are developing their oral language skills at the discourse level.
Our own guidance, along with that of theEEF, Ofsted and the DfE, advocates for starting with ‘short but complete writing opportunities’ that help children practise writing for a purpose and in context. This is in opposition to focusing solely on isolated sentences or disconnected grammar exercises.
Our Writing Development Map shows how composition and transcription become increasingly integrated. Proficiency in both follows a gradual developmental trajectory, where these components become more and more interconnected and automated over time. Composition and transcription rely on one another for their development. Therefore, writing short texts allows children to successfully develop their composing skills while their transcription skills are developing too.
Practical implications for teachers
Use mentor texts which realistically match the amount and type of writing you want the children to produce for themselves. For example:
Model one aspect of writing each day, through the principles of self-regulation strategy development instruction, to show children how short but complete texts are structured.
Focus on quality, not quantity: Emphasise short, purposeful and coherent writing projects in the EYFS and KS1.
Use a developmentally appropriate writing process, such as the book-making approach, which includes scaffolds like drawing for planning and oral rehearsal to help children organise, translate, and transcribe their ideas fluently and happily.
Show children how to revise and proof-read even the shortest pieces of writing.
For more details, consider reading the following publications. Alternatively, you can download our EYFS-KS1 units plans and programme of study. Remember, these publications and unit plans are FREE for members. To become a member, follow this link.
Conclusion
The expectation that young children should produce multi-paragraph writing in Reception and early KS1 is not supported by the evidence. Instead, research strongly supports a developmentally appropriate approach that focuses on transcriptional fluency while still teaching children to compose whole, meaningful texts on a manageable scale.
Making short picturebooks and chapter books across EYFS-KS1 is not a compromise or a ‘lesser form of writing’. They are vital, evidence-informed stepping stones to becoming confident and capable writers.
When children are in the writing classroom, their brains are like a busy workshop. They are builders and project managers who are crafting texts. An important part of crafting these texts is thinking. Here’s what children are up to while they are writing:
Level 1: The doing
Their brain gets to work coming up with writing ideas. They are thinking about what they want to write about and are planning it out.
They then translate these ideas into thoughts, words, phrases and sentences in their mind before transcribing them to paper (or screen).
They also look at what they’ve written and read it back to themselves.
We can call this ‘the doing.’ They are the production strategies children use as they are writing. Here’s a nice explanation taken from our publication The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing:
Level 2: The thinking
The thinking part of their writing process is acting like a project manager. It looks at what the “doing” part is doing. It thinks about the words they’ve written and the ideas they’ve shared.
They ask themselves questions like: Does this make sense?, Is that the right word? and Will the person reading this understand me?
Based on this thinking, they tell the “doing” part what to do next. They might say: Change that word!, Add more details here!, Rub out that sentence!, or Let’s try planning a bit more…!
When we write, our brains are always doing this merry dance between the doingand the thinking.This goes on and on until we feel like our writing is finished. Children as young as three start doing this kind of thinking and doing while writing (see here for examples).
Scribbles and drawings are where they start. When they are starting out, children will make scribbles, letter-like shapes and drawings (see here for examples). They are already trying to translate their thoughts into marks. Learning that a written mark can stand in for a spoken word is a massive and profound step in children’s thinking about language.
Writing helps children look closely at words. When they write, children are translating their thoughts into words. Writing lets children see these words. This helps them notice how words are built, how sentences go together, and how they need to use different words and sentences depending on who they are writing for (This is called perspective taking and you can read more about it here). Writing helps children think about language itself.
Thinking about their writing helps children improve. The more children practice considering their ideas, turning those ideas into sentences, transcribing those sentences to paper, and revising them, the more fluent they become. As our Writing Mapshows, writing fluency is a key factor in children’s writing success.
Implications for classroom practice
According to our Writing Map, when teachers embrace this metacognitive model for writing, they equip their students with the tools to produce high-quality texts. For example:
1. Explicitly teach children the writing processes: Planning class writing projects so that children work through the full writing process can help them develop a deeper understanding of both writing and what it means to be a writer. This helps them become better writers and thinkers.
Hereis a developmentally-appropriate writing process for children in the EYFS-KS1.
4. Encourage reflection and verbalisation: Provide regular opportunities for students to talk about their writing through ego-centric speech [LINK], verbal feedback [LINK], class sharing and Author’s Chair [LINK].
5. Acknowledge and develop children’s metalinguistic and metapragmatic awareness: By teaching both grammar and at the sentence-level in a functional and purposeful way, children are well positioned to discuss the different effects grammatical craft moves have on their writing (See these two links for more – here and here).
Through functional grammar teaching, children’s awareness of language structure (metalinguistics) and awareness of how language is used effectively in different social contexts and for different purposes (metapragmatics) develops in sophisticated ways. These forms of awareness are strongly linked to improvements in children’s writing quality.
6. Build on children’s early writing development: Recognise that children’s early mark-making and drawings are important developmental milestones. It helps children associate marks with meaning and develops their graphomotor skills. Understanding this developmental shift from “first-order representation” (marks directly portray objects) to “second-order representation” (marks represent spoken words) is profound (see linkfor more).
7. Don’t delay writing instruction: Learning to write should productively run alongside learning to read. By writing, children create a model for representing speech (words, phrases, sentences) that they can then ‘read’ or ‘tell’. This ‘penny drop’ moment can often be the gateway children need to truly engage with reading. It gives them a new kind of intrinsic motivation — as they read aloud words born of their own thoughts and see how others respond. In doing so, they begin to understand the purpose of reading: they have created something worth reading. And now, they read others’ writing in new ways.
Proofreading is a critical skill that helps students refine their writing and become more independent writers. However, convincing students to engage deeply in proofreading can sometimes be a challenge. Often, they see it as tedious or irrelevant, leading to disengagement. At the end of the day, they are children. In many ways, they have a wonderful naivety and lack of prejudice when it comes to people’s transcriptional accuracy. They just don’t seem to care about keeping to conventions as much as us adults seem to! However, by drawing on motivational psychology (see our eBook Motivating Writing Teaching for more details), teachers can develop a classroom environment where proofreading becomes a meaningful and motivating part of the writer’s process.
Here’s how you can apply these theories to keep your students motivated when asking them to proofread their writing.
1. Help students see the value of proofreading
Students are more motivated when they see a task as valuable. Many students think proofreading is just about nitpicking grammar, but you can reframe it as an opportunity to strengthen their voice and make their writing more impactful for their readers.
Practical tips:
Connect with real audiences: Let students know their writing will be shared beyond the classroom walls — that is going to be published for real. Make sure they know that the proof-reading they are doing therefore matters. You can do this by setting a high-value publishing goal with or for your class at the beginning of a class writing project.
Develop peer expertise: Encourage students to become ‘proofreading experts’ in specific areas (e.g. the capitalisation captain, the vocabulary use vixen or the spelling superhero) to build their sense of mastery and writer-identity. These proof-reading experts could be called upon by their peers to help catch a few extra proof-reads! I know of some teachers who give children different hats to indicate their expertise. Extrinsic rewards can be given out to these experts for helping their peers too.
2. Build expectancy for success: Boost their confidence
Students need to believe they will be successful each day. When proofreading feels overwhelming or overly technical, their motivation plummets. Focus on growing their sense of daily proficiency.
Practical tips:
Model just one proofreading strategy explicitly: Provide clear, step-by-step methods for checking a specific aspect of their manuscript (e.g. using the CUPS method).
Start small: Let students focus on finding one type of error at a time to build success and reduce cognitive overload. As children become better proof-readers, they can slowly be asked to do more within a single session.
Praise effort and improvement: Acknowledge and celebrate every proof-read they find! For example, ask students to count the number of proof-reads they make and reward the winner(s) as being the best proof-readers in town! You should also celebrate the student(s) who have the least number of proof-reads to find (because they write extremely accurately as they draft). Don’t be afraid to use extrinsic motivators and rewards at the proof-reading stage.
Provide scaffolds: Use checklists, modelled examples, and posters to help guide students (see our eBook: No More: My Class Can’t Edit! for more details).
3. Lower the ‘cognitive cost’: Make proofreading feel quick and like no sweat.
If students believe proof-reading is too time-consuming, boring, or likely to end in failure, they’ll see the ‘cognitive cost’ as too high. You can minimise these barriers.
Practical tips:
Break proofreading into bite-sized tasks. There are lots of ways to do this. For example, proofread for just one CUPS item or proof-read just one paragraph a day.
Make it social: Let children proofread together – and let them see how many proof-reads they can find together. Gamification can work well here. For example, you could introduce a leaderboard. However, it’s important that you celebrate the teams that had the least number of proof-reads to find and the team who found the most.
You might not like this suggestion – but I’m afraid it’s true. Some of the writing we make needs to be more correct than other pieces. That’s a reality. Maybe for some writing projects, you don’t need to put as much instructional focus into transcriptional accuracy. Instead, you might want to focus on developing other areas of children’s writing proficiency. There are lots of ways to organise writing units with different focuses. Take a look at this article for more details: The Components Of An Effective Writing Unit.
Give timely, supportive verbal feedback: When students see you’re noticing their efforts and not just their mistakes, the emotional ‘cost’ of proof-reading decreases rapidly. Below is an excerpt taken from our eBook: Pupil-Conferencing In The Writing Classroom.
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Teachers and assistant teachers can sometimes focus on children’s transcriptional errors too early in their writing process. Be reassured that children will be given an opportunity to attend to these things in dedicated proof-reading sessions (Young & Ferguson 2023c). We can also be tempted to fix children’s writing on their behalf. However, this is inappropriate and counterproductive. When we do this, we create dependent writers – and we are in the business of developing independent writers.
The moment you get that famous red pen out and do the cognitive work on the children’s behalf, you are disempowering them. We recommend that teachers and assistant teachers roughly point out where some transcriptional errors may be found within a child’s manuscript, and then ask the child to find and correct them for themselves. For example:
Wow, you found so many edits! I can see you have three more to find though.
Whoa 35 edits. You’re one of the best proof-readers around. You do still have some spellings in your last paragraph to sort out though please.
Ah, you’ve still got a few capitalisation issues in your first paragraph – you better go find them and sort them out.
You’ve done a really good job at proof-reading this so far. However, you’ve got a few spellings that need sorting out on this page – maybe proof-read it with Callum and see if you can get them sorted.
Always celebrate the conventions children are using appropriately before talking with them about a convention they may be overlooking. Ensure that your conferences always start with what the child is doing, using phrases such as:
Opening phrases for proof-reading conferences:
I can see that you’re a writer who knows to…
Wow, look at all those…
I really love how you’ve used … that’s really going to help your reader out.
These are fantastic. You’re really thinking about your reader.
Would you look at that? This is great! Why did you use…
I can tell you’re a great proof-reader, look at how you’ve…
Whoa, you must have made about 20 proof-reads on this! That’s amazing. You’re the best proof-reader I know.
Next, comes the teaching part of the editing conference. Here are some great openers you can use:
Teaching phrases for proof-reading conferences:
Did you have a reason for deciding … [to put a semi-colon here?]
Tell me about your choice to… [use commas around this extra bit of information.]
I noticed that you… Explain what you’re thinking. [I’ve noticed the book you’re making hasn’t got a title – is there a reason for that?]
Show me where you’ve tried to help your reader understand your writing [Bringing conventions back to their purpose – to help our readers]
Let me show you how I help my readers understand my writing so you can do it too… [Sometimes, children need an additional example beyond the whole-class mini-lesson]
Let’s look in the book you’re reading to see how the writer has done it [Let’s look at how the author used the conventions for speech punctuation]
As you will see, framing your teaching comments like this is a sympathetic way of drawing children’s attention to errors or omissions, clearing up possible misunderstandings, and getting them to re-think and talk about the function of conventions.
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Final thoughts
When you use motivational theory to inform your teaching practice, you can design proofreading activities that:
Feel valuable and worthwhile
Build students’ feelings of confidence and competence
Are low in emotional and cognitive ‘cost’
Support children’s need for social connection
By doing this, proofreading stops being just a correction task – it becomes part of a rich writing process where students take ownership, feel proud of their growth, and understand why their writing matters.
For many teachers, the prospect of teaching writing can feel daunting. Research indicates that many of us feel ill-prepared to teach writing, often replicating the ineffective methods we experienced ourselves as children. This challenge extends specifically to teaching about sentences, leaving many unsure where to begin. Yet, effective sentence construction is vital for clear and meaningful written expression. Struggles with sentence construction can significantly impact children’s writing, consuming their working memory, hindering fluency, and affecting clarity and coherence.
Recognising this widespread issue, The Writing For Pleasure Centre was founded as a think tank and action research community dedicated to helping all young people become passionate and successful writers. Through extensive research, including meta-analyses and case studies, we have developed a pedagogy based on what the science and research evidence indicates is the most effective practice. This approach, known as The Writing For Pleasure approach, can be considered a synonym for world-class writing teaching.
A cornerstone of this approach is sentence-level instruction. Teaching at the sentence level is essential because it supports core writing processes like planning, drafting, and revising, and helps free up working memory for higher-level concerns like purpose and audience. Limited sentence skills can hinder children’s writing fluency, making it difficult for children to translate ideas into text quickly and often leading to writing that is judged negatively (see our Writing Map for more details).
To address these challenges, we offer our Sentence-Level Curriculum. This comprehensive curriculum draws on our extensive research base. It provides teachers with the confidence and tools needed to teach about sentences in a way that helps children write their most successful and meaningful pieces.
The curriculum organises sentence-level instruction into three categories reflecting what children are trying to achieve in their writing:
Focused sentences: Lessons that help children concentrate on the most important parts of their writing – nouns and verbs – forming the basis of well-focused sentences.
Balanced sentences: Instruction to help children make connections between their thoughts and ideas, sharing reasoning, providing contrasts, establishing conditions, and discussing alternatives.
Developed sentences: Lessons focused on pushing the reader’s thinking, understanding, and imaginings, elaborating on meaning using artistic flair, rhetorical techniques and poetic devices.
Our Sentence-Level Curriculum incorporates writing-study lessons, which involve sharing powerful ‘how to’ knowledge and inviting children to apply it during writing time. These mini-lessons are short, explicit, and direct, teaching one concept before inviting application. The approach recommends a consistent routine of mini-lesson, writing time, and class sharing.
The other key component of the curriculum is the use of sentence-building mini-projects. These are not rote exercises but short, playful and purposeful ways for children to explore writing by experimenting, taking risks, and discovering new ways of shaping ideas. The projects are designed to build children’s skills quickly but incrementally, starting with simple sentences and progressing towards a full repertoire of understanding.
These short projects are based on three evidence-informed principles:
Teaching students what sentences are and expanding their awareness of syntactic possibilities.
Focusing on sentence formation and revision to gradually reduce cognitive load.
Improving children’s writing fluency.
The projects encourage children to see the function of different punctuation and sentence types and how manipulating syntax helps them discover different ways of expressing ideas. They allow children to focus on crafting small, manageable pieces of text within the broader process of ‘making’ real writing.
Specific mini-projects cover a range of sentence and grammar concepts suitable for different age ranges, from the EYFS to Year 6 (3-11 year olds). For example:
Understanding what a sentence is
Using end punctuation (full stops, question marks, exclamation marks)
Connecting ideas with coordinating conjunctions
Adding detail with adjectives and expanded noun phrases
Making verbs more precise with adverbs
Using pronouns to avoid repetition
Crafting complex sentences with subordinating conjunctions
Using the passive voice
Understanding the subjunctive mood
Adding extra information with parenthesis
Connecting related sentences with semicolons
Introducing explanations or lists with colons
Our sentence curriculum emphasises the use of mentor texts to show children what can be done with sentences and how they can apply these techniques in their own writing. Teachers are encouraged to model techniques from their own writing and from other published examples. The projects also use drawing to help children – especially those who struggle most – focus on expressing their ideas clearly and to visualise how different sentence constructions affect the style and meaning of what they want to say.
Ultimately, The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Curriculum is designed to help children gain control over sentence construction and punctuation, leading to increased confidence and the ability to write with greater originality and style. By focusing on the function of sentence elements and engaging children in playful experimentation and thoughtful revision, this curriculum lays the foundation for more fluent, expressive, and successful writing.
Are you a teacher looking for effective ways to help your students master sentence construction and punctuation? Do you hear yourself thinking, “They don’t know what a sentence is!” or “They don’t know what end punctuation is!”? The Writing For Pleasure Centre offers a solution designed specifically for young writers of all needs and abilities.
Sentence-Building Mini-Projects, developed by experienced writer-teachers Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson, are more than just exercises – they are a playful, purposeful, and powerful way for you and your pupils to explore writing. Grounded in extensive research and classroom practice, this programme provides direct instruction at the sentence-level through structured yet engaging projects.
The core of the programme involves short book-making projects. These projects offer a unique advantage by allowing children to focus on crafting manageable pieces of text within the broader process of creating real writing. They are not rote exercises or worksheets. Instead, they closely mirror real writing by asking students to revise and enhance sentences they have composed themselves. The projects are also infinitely repeatable, providing practice whenever needed.
What makes these projects so effective?
Functional understanding: Children learn the function of different pieces of punctuation and sentence types, rather than just memorising terms. For example, they learn how end punctuation signals the end of a thought and how a sentence should be read, or how coordinating conjunctions let them add more information.
Practical application: The projects promote a better understanding of capitalisation and punctuation through practical application, making grammar instruction far more meaningful.
Experimentation and discovery: Each project invites children to experiment, take risks, and discover new ways of shaping their ideas.
Incremental skill building: Projects are sequenced carefully, helping young writers build their sentence-level skills incrementally, moving from simple sentences towards a full repertoire of understanding. This means there are projects suitable for various age ranges, from the EYFS through to Year 6.
Focus on meaning and audience: Students are helped to consider how sentence structure impacts their readers and gain a greater appreciation for constructing unique writing styles. They learn to make each word count towards the meaning they wish to convey.
Drawing integration: Drawing is an important part of the process. By developing content through pictures, the projects reduce cognitive load, allowing young writers, especially those with difficulties, to focus on expression. Drawing also helps children see how their sentence-level decisions impact the meaning of their illustrations, making grammatical patterns visible and instruction more useful and exciting.
Building confidence and fluency: As young writers gain control over sentence construction and punctuation, they gain confidence and begin to write with greater originality and style. This also enhances their reading fluency and comprehension by familiarising them with complex sentence patterns.
Supports revision skills: The projects help children transform their sentences for meaning, not just make superficial changes.
The mini-projects cover a wide range of sentence-level concepts, including:
Understanding what a sentence is
Using end punctuation
Adding information with coordinating conjunctions
Using adjectives and adverbs
Understanding apostrophes for possession
Using commas and semi-colons for lists
Applying capital letters
Using prepositional phrases
Adding extra information with subordinating conjunctions
Choosing precise nouns and verbs
Punctuating direct speech with speech marks and speaker tags
Understanding the usefulness of pronouns
Exploring modal verbs
Adding ‘bonus’ information with relative clauses and parenthesis
Understanding the passive voice
Using the subjunctive mood
Preventing ambiguity with hyphens
Connecting related sentences with semi-colons
Using colons for ‘drumrolls’ and explanations
Constructing complex multi-clause sentences
Understanding tense
Writing in different perspectives (1st, 2nd, 3rd person)
By integrating these projects into your teaching, you can provide your students with the tools and understanding they need to become more proficient, confident, and expressive writers. Each project includes planning guidance, exemplar texts, and subject knowledge to help you seamlessly integrate sentence-level teaching into your existing curriculum.
Explore The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Building Mini-Projects and help your students write happily and fluently!
At The Writing For Pleasure Centre, we offer a supportive and empowering model of writing instruction which we believe is unmatched by other commercial programmes. Our approach gives teachers:
Expertly-crafted scripted lessons and units
Additional lessons so that teachers can build their own custom units based on their students’ most pressing writerly needs
eBooks to help develop teachers’ independence
Personalised email support through our CPD programme
Our goal is, as always, to help teachers become successful, confident and independent writer-teachers.
Units that model excellence
Each unit has been crafted by an experienced writer-teacher who knows how to embed the principles of effective writing instruction. Our units:
Provide immediate structure, resources and clarity for busy teachers
Supply rich model texts and sequenced lessons
Include grammar and sentence-level lessons
Reduce teachers’ planning time while developing the quality of their instruction
Built-in flexibility: Plan with confidence
Each unit includes a suite of additional lessons so teachers can:
Adapt the units quickly to reflect their pupils’ most pressing and immediate writerly needs
Build their own units with expert scaffolding
Be responsive to classroom dynamics while maintaining fidelity to the principles of best practice school-wide.
This means every unit can be treated as a starting point, not just a script – allowing teachers who wish to teach responsively the joy and satisfaction of doing so.
Literature that builds independence
Our embedded CPD articles help teachers:
Understand the pedagogy behind great writing teaching
Grow their subject, pedagogical and curriculum knowledge
Eventually plan their very own writing units from scratch with total confidence
Unlike other commercial providers, we don’t want teachers to feel they have to rely on our scripted units forever. We want them to become independent curriculum designers who get to teach writing with expertise and pleasure.
CPD that connects and supports
A truly unique feature of our programme is our CPD with personalised feedback. When schools join our professional development offer, they can:
Email us their unit plans
Receive quick, supportive feedback, ideas, and encouragement on a personal level
Gain reassurance and insight from experienced mentors
This kind of close, ongoing support helps teachers refine their practice, grow in confidence, and feel part of a wider writing community.
In summary
Our updated units provide:
Expertly written example units and scripted lessons
Rich model texts and sequenced lessons
Grammar and sentence-level lessons
Additional lessons so teachers can adapt and build their own units
Literature so teachers can learn to plan their own units independently if they want to
CPD with personalised and ongoing support and feedback
We believe teachers ultimately deserve real in-depth support – not just scripts.
We believe children deserve to write with purpose, pleasure, and pride.
Let’s create classrooms and schools where everyone writes with joy and satisfaction!
What now?
If you’re already a member, simply log in. We have updated all the planning links in the Class Writing Project section of the members’ area. Go check them out and get downloading!
Teachers and schools can purchase any of our EYFS-KS2 writing units from our website for £5.95 [LINK].
Teachers can purchase an individual licence to our website for £28.50 a year. This gives them access to all our eBooks, unit plans and resources [LINK].
Schools can purchase a whole-school licence to our website for £400 a year. This gives everyone access to our eBooks, programme of study, assessment guidance, CPD materials, units plans and resources. If you’re a smaller school, get in touch as we may be able to provide you with a discount [LINK].
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If you want to get in touch, you can use our contact formor email us: hello@writing4pleasure.com
Great writing instruction thrives on both structure and responsiveness. At The Writing For Pleasure Centre, we believe that children flourish as writers when their teachers are supported to be confident, successful and reflective writer-teachers. That’s why our approach offers more than just our pre-planned units and scripted lessons. We provide expertly designed units but we also give teachers the tools and knowledge they need to eventually plan their own.
Unlike many other commercial schemes, our goal isn’t to make teachers dependent on our materials. Instead, we eventually want to empower them to design their own writing units for their classes. However, we want to ensure that their units are grounded in the principles of effective writing teaching and are responsive to the unique needs of their pupils at that time.
Expertly written units and lessons that model excellence
We refuse to naively ignore the pressures, demands and time-constraints faced by teachers. We are also very much aware of the fact that teachers rarely receive adequate training on how to teach writing while on their initial teacher education courses. We know that pre-service and early career teachers are often left frustrated and disappointed. This is why we offer scripted writing units and lessons.
Our units serve as powerful models of practice. They’ve been crafted by experienced writing teachers and researchers who understand what excellent writing instruction looks like at each stage of a child’s development. For busy teachers, or those new to teaching writing, our scripted units offer clarity, confidence, and high-quality instruction without the burden or anxiety of planning a writing unit on your own from scratch. They’re an ideal starting point for delivering coherent and consistent writing projects across a whole school.
A unique feature: Additional lessons for teacher-led planning
What sets our units apart from other commercial providers is that every writing unit we provide includes a wealth of additional lesson ideas which teachers can draw on to ‘build their own unit’ if they choose to. These lessons are like Lego bricks. Teachers can easily decide to include them or move them around. This is a deliberate and powerful design choice. We recognise that teachers know their pupils best – not us – and that they may want to tailor our units around a particular aspect of writing.
Rather than locking teachers into a fixed sequence, we offer them the flexibility to be responsive to what they think their class actually needs instruction in most! Our additional lessons allow teachers to remix, expand, and otherwise shape our units in ways that suit their classroom context – while still maintaining high standards and whole-school fidelity to evidence-informed practice.
A unique feature: Email support
A truly unique feature of our CPD training is our offer to teachers to email us their unit plans so that they can receive quick assistance, feedback and encouragement. Teachers are able to gain reassurance and insight from experienced mentors. This kind of personal and ongoing support helps teachers refine their practice, grow in confidence, and feel part of a wider writing teaching community. They don’t have to plan alone.
A unique feature: Literature that builds independence
Our third unique offering is our collection of eBooks and research summaries which support teachers in understanding the principles behind effective pedagogy so they can develop the confidence to plan their own units from scratch. This is always our long-term aim: that teachers engage deeply with pedagogy, see how our scripted units reflect best-practice in action, and then use that knowledge to become independent curriculum designers.
This isn’t about just handing over scripts to teachers and being done with it. It’s about their professional growth. Teachers are not technicians – they are thinkers, writers, and professionals. Our eBooks are designed to help them embrace that role fully.
Conclusion: From holding your hand to self-sufficiency
By offering high-quality scripted units, and also the tools for self-directed planning, we believe we provide something unique: support without dependency. We meet teachers where they are – whether they want to follow a fully scripted unit, adapt one using our additional lessons, or create their own from the start. We walk with them on their journey towards greater confidence and professional autonomy.
This is how we help develop not only better writing outcomes for children, but also more empowered, knowledgeable, and fulfilled teachers of writing.
What now?
Teachers and schools can purchase any of our EYFS-KS2 writing units from our website at a unit price of £5.95 [LINK].
Teachers can purchase an individual licence to our website for £28.50 a year. This gives them access to all our eBooks, unit plans and resources [LINK].
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Unlock the magic of writing non-fiction with How To Teach Non-Fiction Writing In Key Stage One. This innovative guide by writer-teachers Felicity Ferguson and Ross Young is designed to transform how young children create and share their knowledge in the writing classroom.
Based on extensive research and practical experience, this book offers a fresh perspective on teaching non-fiction. It emphasises the importance of infusing personal voice, humour, and artistry into informational texts, making them engaging and memorable for both writers and readers. Within these pages, Ferguson & Young also present The Writing For Pleasure approach, a methodology proven to inspire the youngest writers and enhance their writing skills.
Inside, you will find:
A detailed progression for teaching non-fiction writing.
Step-by-step guides for planning and teaching non-fiction writing projects.
Insights into using mentor texts to inspire and guide your young writers.
Practical advice on delivering effective writing lessons, including idea generation, planning, drafting, revising, proof-reading and publishing.
Strategies to support multilingual learners and children with special educational needs.
Methods for assessing writing in a way that celebrates growth and creativity.
The authors, drawing on their own challenging journey to becoming effective writing teachers, share their story and research findings, providing a compelling argument for a new way of teaching writing that prioritises both rigour and pleasure.
Equip your young writers with the tools and confidence they need to express themselves and share their knowledge with the world. How To Teach Non-Fiction Writing In Key Stage One is your essential guide to fostering a lifelong love of writing in every child.
Early writing development & the book-making approach
Children start their writing journey earlier than is generally supposed. By the age of two, children begin to understand that writing gives them a voice to share their thoughts, ideas, stories, opinions and messages with the world around them.
Our Writing Map illustrates how early writers develop both their compositional processes, such as idea generation, and the transcription skills needed to ‘translate’ those ideas into readable and enjoyable writing for others. The Writing Map also recognises how early writing experiences serve children’s oral language, reading and writing development because of the interconnected nature of these skills, and shows that, as children receive more instruction in phonics, handwriting, and encoding, the key components of writing success become increasingly linked.
Children start their writing journey using their emergent writing practices. These are the early marks and scribbles they make (see below). It’s clear, therefore, that young children learn about composition before learning about formal transcription. We can take advantage of this when children are in preschool or Nursery by adopting the book-making approach to writing.
With the introduction of letter formation instruction, phonics, and encoding strategies, children in Reception naturally transition away from these early practices and begin producing conventional ‘adult’ writing. By the end of KS1, most children write using common spelling rules and varied sentence structures to create very short yet meaningful pieces.
Our book-making approach
Our “book-making approach” is a teaching method where children write short books, combining drawing, oral language and writing to express their ideas. Through book-making, children quickly learn important things about writing that are strong predictors for future writing success. For example:
Writing moves from left to right and top to bottom in English
The marks we make on paper have meaning and can be ‘read’ or ‘told’
Know how to form letters correctly
Understand letter-sound associations and can encode words quickly and happily
Generate ideas and communicate those ideas by writing complete sentences
Even before children enter Nursery, many have started their writing journey. For example, 67% of three year olds already know to write linearly with over half knowing to write from left to right (LINK). Children recognise that when they make marks, those marks carry meaning and that what one thinks and says can be drawn and written down. We also know that children write for lots of different purposes and so write in different genres.
Our book-making approach helps children develop their ability to generate and organise writing ideas by first drawing, then writing single words, and finally forming sentences about their drawings. Even before they can write conventionally, children in pre-school and Nursery begin to associate their marks with the rhythm or length of sentences. For example, see four-year-old Wyatt’s book about a dinosaur. He uses two marks to represent his two sentences: He is big. He is scary. Isn’t that wonderful?
Here’s another example. Four-year-old Jenny has made a book about Elsa from Frozen. However, when her friend pointed out that her writing doesn’t match her picture (she reads her writing as saying: Elsa was sad), she proceeds to cross out her old writing and writes: Elsa was happy in her emergent writing. Isn’t that interesting?
Letter formation & handwriting development
Fluent handwriting is a strong predictor of future writing success because it allows children to focus on idea generation, as well as sentence and text organisation, rather than the mechanics of transcribing. As shared earlier, an extensive body of research shows how children’s early handwriting progresses from marks and scribbles on a page during Nursery to conventional forms by the time they enter KS1. To support children’s book-making, schools must have strong handwriting provision and deliver short but regular handwriting instruction. For more, see our Handwriting Provision Checklist.
Phonics, encoding & spelling development
As children receive phonics lessons, they learn about the alphabetic principle (connecting letters to sounds) and begin using encoding strategies (breaking words into phonetic components) to write what’s called informed spellings. Learning to write informed spellings is an essential process. As children engage in writing informed spelling, they are mastering their skills in orally segmenting words and transcribing the letters that represent the sounds they can hear.
When children first start on this spelling journey, they may only write the initial or most salient sounds (e.g., “D” to represent dinosaur or “U ct lef” to represent You can’t leave). They may also use a combination of conventional letters and emergent writing. However, with encoding instruction, and more opportunities to make books, they begin to write word endings and long vowel sounds (e.g. cake and choose).
Children’s informed spelling skills are important because, as you can imagine, they are strongly associated with later writing and reading success (LINK and LINK). Indeed, children who learn to write informed spelling outperform children who don’t receive such an early apprenticeship in spelling. Over time, children gradually acquire spelling rules and progress towards writing more and more words conventionally. To support children’s book-making, schools must have strong phonics and spelling provision and deliver explicit phonics and spelling instruction. For more, see our Spelling Provision Checklist.
However, while clear patterns of progression in early writing development have been well documented, as all teachers know, there can be significant variation in this skill among EYFS-KS1 children! This is what makes our book-making such an inclusive approach. From their very first day of preschool or Nursery, all children can participate in book-making lessons by mark-making. While some specific children in Reception and KS1 may still need to rely on mark-making and informed-spellings at times, almost all will write conventional sentences that are readable to others. Most importantly, all children can engage in book-making because it meets them where they are at developmentally. No one needs to receive a different pedagogy. No one needs to be left out. Instead, it might be the case that some children require additional instruction and practice. See our Identifying And Addressing Children’s Writing Needs toolkit for more on this.
Developing children’s writer identities and taking advantage of their intrinsic writing motivation
Young children come to school excited to learn to write with around 75-80% already believing that they are writers who can write successful stories (LINK). Children don’t tend to enter school with negative feelings or beliefs about writing (LINK). However, as children get older, we know this motivation drops dramatically. EYFS-KS1 teachers can take advantage of this early intrinsic motivation by providing children with book-making opportunities. Research shows that young children find meaningful writing opportunities more engaging than transcription-focused practice. While they do come to appreciate the importance of transcription instruction, this only happens if they get to use and apply these skills in meaningful activities like book-making (LINK).
We know that the best EYFS-KS1 classrooms develop children’s early writing by providing them with:
A high-quality Writing Centre where they can access various writing materials and use them during continuous provision and at home
Letter formation, phonics, encoding and spelling instruction
Teacher-directed class writing projects which cover the foundational purposes for writing (e.g. to entertain and to teach people)
High-quality direct instruction, scaffolds, modelling and verbal feedback
The least effective EYFS-KS1 classrooms are those with limited expectations, belief, and knowledge about children’s early writing development. These classrooms may delay writing instruction until children show an interest or else wait until they are producing conventional transcription – both of which are an instructional mistake (LINK).
Oral language development
Book-making is a fantastic way to develop children’s oral language and prewriting rehearsal skills. Nursery and Reception teachers can say: Tell me what your writing says or Read me your writing and in the process capture valuable insights into the quality of children’s compositional development. Research has shown that teachers who do this have preschool children whose writing is more aligned with the conventions of different writing genres, purposes and audiences (LINKandLINK).
The beauty of this approach is that children in the EYFS don’t have their compositional development delayed unnecessarily by their lack of transcription skills. In fact, children’s compositional development is so strong that when they begin developing their formal transcriptional skills in Reception, they naturally start refining their ideas into manageable sentences that they know they can transcribe successfully (LINK). This focus on oral language as part of the book-making process is essential as research has noted that children’s future writing skills can be partially predicted by their oral language development. This is particularly true for children with language delays or for English language learners. Indeed, the book-making approach is perfect for English-language learners for this reason (see LINK for more details on this).
Drawing and writing
Drawing is also a profound scaffold for early writers as it allows them to plan and organise their ideas prior to translating and transcribing them into a sentence or sentences. It just happens to be perfect for fine motor-skill development too! Research shows that children who are encouraged to draw what it is they want to write before they transcribe it to paper produce writing of a greater complexity and quality than they would by writing alone (LINK). This is because drawing is amazing at reinforcing the connections between (1) ideas generated, (2) oral rehearsal of those ideas, and (3) successful transcription of those ideas to paper (LINK). As you can see below, it naturally supports children’s production strategies for writing:
During book-making time, exceptional teachers of writing will model developmentally appropriate writing strategies and engage children in conversations about their drawings and ideas. They will then shift their focus towards transcription-based writing skills, such as letter formation or informed spelling. For example, they’ll undertake Underwriting with pupils (LINK for more details). Evidence clearly points towards the need for children to receive this kind of high-quality interaction when writing (LINK, LINK and LINK).
Explicit instruction has also been identified as a key factor in children’s early writing development. For example, teachers should begin book-making time by modelling the aspect of the writing process they want the children to do for themselves that day. Ideally, this would be done through the principles of SRSD instruction which is one of the most validated and effective things a teacher of writing can do in their classroom to improve children’s confidence and the quality of their writing (LINK for more on this).
Developing children’s writing fluency at the sentence-level
Our book-making approach aims to enhance children’s transcriptional fluency and sentence-level fluency (for more on developing children’s writing fluency see this LINK).
Essentially, to support children’s writing fluency, teachers should scaffold learning and gradually extend children’s writing abilities by encouraging them to work at a level where they can achieve success. School leaders and writing coordinators therefore need to think carefully about how they build up to extended class writing projects over time (LINK for more details on this). Here’s an example:
For example, for some pupils, all they should be asked to do is write a single word or simple sentence about their drawing while others can be asked to write multiple sentences. The links between book-making and teaching at the sentence level are profound. For more information, readers may wish to use our ‘What is a sentence?’ and ‘What is end punctuation’ book-making intervention projects which accompany our book-making method (LINK for more).
Moving forward
Unfortunately, Nursery, Reception, and KS1 teachers too often fail to model writing strategies that support children’s early writing development best (LINK and LINK). There is clearly a need for EYFS-KS1 teachers to access quality resources, planning and professional development opportunities. If you think you could benefit from such CPD, please get in touch with us here. We’d be delighted to come and write with you and your pupils!
To find out more about how you can introduce the book-making approach into your EYFS-KS1 classrooms, download any of the publications below. These can be found in the resources area of our website.
Alternatively, all of our publications and unit plans are FREE to our members. Membership is £28.50 a year. To become a member, follow this link.
