16 Feb Creating a love of literacy at Denbigh Community Primary School

Outstanding

“After an outstanding Ofsted in 2013, our school had little to improve on, but one area we chose to focus on was handwriting. Many children join our school below the age-related learning expectations, and the school has a pupil premium of around 50% and higher than average SEND. All the school team strive to make learning as enjoyable as possible so that children are engaged and ready to soak up new knowledge.”

Language and Literacy

“At our school, we wanted to further raise pupils’ attainment in writing by providing pupils with a greater range of exciting first-hand experiences to write about, making sure that pupils are always clear about what successful writing looks like.”

“But, with pupils having challenges in speech and language, accessing the curriculum becomes a barrier. Our team work hard to build the foundations for learning and remove the barriers to learning through developing the children’s communication, opportunities for challenge, reasoning skills and cultural experience.”

Thinking outside the box

“For the senior leadership team and teachers, this means thinking outside of the box. As a result, the curriculum at the school is tailored to reflect the pupil’s needs.

“Children at our school are exposed to a range of new experiences to support literacy, including cultural experiences and how the world works. Topic-based trips happen regularly, and forest schools and firepits are amongst the many activities the children can access.

“To improve writing, for example, they built a replica ‘London’ and then set the model on fire so that they could contextualise the ‘Great fire of London’ and bring the whole experience into their writing of a news report about the event.

“Thinking outside the box also continues when it comes to technology.”

Technology works

“We are lucky to now be able to provide pupils with a 1-2-1 iPad provision across the school which helps pupils in terms of their exposure to technology and access to school and homework.

“We then started looking at what applications were available to support handwriting as we started using Kaligo in September 2021. To be honest, we haven’t looked back.

“We use Kaligo is KS1 to get the fundamentals right, then in KS2, we use Kaligo and pen and paper to transfer to books.

“Classes spend between 15 and 30 minutes per day in dedicated handwriting time. Well, in fact, we set 15 minutes per day, but when they arrive in the morning or just after lunch, they are straight on Kaligo; they love it. Their enthusiasm for handwriting is incredible, and now that we have the Kaligo styluses, the impact on handwriting is excellent.

“The level of engagement with Kaligo is huge; it’s something we haven’t witnessed with other apps before. Kaligo is interactive, and the immediate feedback means that they are engaged, and their handwriting is thriving because of it.”

The acid test

“As any teacher knows, the progress of handwriting is particularly tricky to measure. So the usual acid test is to open their handwriting book on page 1 and then look after a few weeks to see the improvement.

“With Kaligo, the improvement in handwriting from the first page to now is just amazing. You can visibly see the brilliant impact Kaligo has had on handwriting standards in a short period of time. Kaligo is impressive.”

“As a teacher, Kaligo has been beneficial in breaking the most significant barrier. The first point of any teaching is getting the child engaged, or you won’t see progress.

“Kaligo gets pupils engaged and makes a mundane task exciting and making progress with handwriting”.

Make sure to take a look at our other success stories.