Writing - Year 5

Here are some resources to help support your child's writing during their time in Year 5.

Here you'll find all of the spelling rules and patterns that are taught throughout the year. Each week your child will receive spellings based upon each focus.

All the grammar and punctuation terminology your child needs to know can be found here. Click the link to download a glossary with examples.

This document shows all of the words on the Year 5 word list. Try to support you child in learning how to spell them and also how to use them in their writing.

What should a great piece of writing look like in Year 5? Click on the picture below to download an example of how the different grammar and punctuation techniques can be used for maximum effect. 

Your child's teacher will be looking for the following features from a Year 5 writer.

They will be expecting skills taught in previous year groups to be secure. Sentences should be grammatically correct, with only rare error. Capital letters and full stops should be correctly used and children should use a range of different vocabulary and sentence starters.

Your child's writing should display the following skills:

• write a range of texts such as fiction narratives, newspaper articles, non-chronological reports, information texts, letters and persuasive writing;
• ensuring paragraphs or sections are used to organise writing;
• characters and settings are described with details (such as adjectives, adverbs, similes, metaphors or expanded noun phrases);
• the difference in formality between written and spoken English;
• cohesive devices, such as pronouns, to avoid repetition (she, he, they etc.);
• cohesive devices, such as adverbials, to structure a text (later on, soon after, the following morning, meanwhile etc.);
• modal verbs;
• different sentences structures (simple sentences, subordinate clauses, starting with conjunctions or adverbials etc.);
• fronted adverbials are followed by a comma;
• parenthesis (using brackets, commas and dashes);
• use of the dash;
• relative clauses and relative pronouns;
• correctly punctuated speech;
• handwriting is joined correctly the majority of the time;
• most spellings are correct, with a dictionary used to support unknown words;
• spell most words on the Year 5 word list and use them in writing.