In our Reception classes, we use Greg Bottrill’s Drawing Club as the foundation for our literacy lessons. Drawing Club provides a rich and imaginative context in which children explore stories, picture books, and animations. Through whole-class teaching and small-group sessions, children deepen their language, broaden their vocabulary, and continue to develop their fine motor skills.
Drawing Club supports children in the early stages of writing, guiding them from writing individual sounds and simple words to composing short, dictated sentences. Children learn to apply their growing phonics knowledge in meaningful contexts and begin to understand how spoken language is represented in writing. Over time, this structured approach helps them build simple sentences with increasing confidence and enables them to express their own ideas more independently.
Explicit vocabulary teaching forms an important part of each Drawing Club session. We introduce key words linked to the story world and model how these can be used throughout the week. This deliberate focus helps broaden children’s language and equips them with the vocabulary needed to express detailed ideas in both their drawings and developing writing.
Drawing Club encourages creativity and supports children in expressing their ideas through both illustrations and early writing, all within the context of high-quality stories. It enables children to immerse themselves in imaginative worlds while steadily developing the foundational skills necessary for writing.
“I love teaching writing through Drawing Club as it brings magic into our classroom and pushes the children to be creative, inventive, and adventurous. The children are excited and willing to have a go, they love to share their marvelous ideas and the progress they make is unbelievable! From mark-making to sentence writing, Drawing Club guides the children in their development and allows them to discover the joy of writing.”
– Miss Crowther, Reception Class Teacher
Across the setting, we use Greg Bottrill’s ‘Message Centre’ to inspire and ignite child-initiated writing and mark- making. The Message Centre is all about messaging! It develops a sense of purpose and magic into the children’s mark making.
The message centre enables our children to explore the joy of messaging, an approach to sprinkling extra joy over the top of their day, showing them how reading, writing and mathematics can be hidden in and around their room and outdoors too. Our children love hiding and finding – think pass the parcel, birthday presents, egg hunts and hide and seek. There is a buzz to be had, and it is this buzz that the Message Centre approach has at its heart.
“In Nursery, we like to be sneaky and write secret messages onto masking tape and stick them onto a teacher’s back without them noticing. We have developed our imagination and joy of mark making by writing messages to different characters that we have discovered visiting our classroom or even living inside enclosed spaces such as Chase from paw patrol or even pirates!”
– Miss Morton, Nursery Class Teacher
Secret Symbols
We love creating secret symbols together in EYFS. A secret symbol can have many powers and creates no limits to your imagination. Teachers and children can create secret symbols to build on their play and create a sense of magic! We might hide a secret symbol in our shoe to make us run really fast or we might draw a symbol that sends a rocket that we have just built.
Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle’ is an Early Writing programme created by Shonette Bason.
In Nursery, we use Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle to help children develop early mark-making skills. This approach supports the first steps in writing by encouraging children to practise large, controlled movements before transferring them to paper. During sessions, children hold small pieces of fabric in each hand and follow the teacher’s gross motor movements to music. These movements may include going up and down, side to side, making circles, or creating wavy lines. Once children are confident with these actions, they repeat them using thick pens on paper. Over time, the marks they make begin to connect with the themes we are exploring. For example, during a minibeasts topic, children may practise wiggly lines before using them to draw a worm. These sessions are energetic, engaging, and enjoyable, while also building the motor control and confidence needed for early writing.
Clapgate Primary School
10 Cranmore Drive
Belle Isle
Leeds
LS10 4AW
Headteacher: Miss Taylor
Deputy Headteacher: Miss Procter
SENDCO: Mrs Lawton
Office: Mrs Austin,
Miss Johnson,
Mrs Belt and Miss Stamp
Chair of Governors: Mr Bache
Tel: 0113 271 6700
Email: clapgate@clapgateprimaryschool.org
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