Writing

Writing

At Barnham Broom C of E VA Primary School we use The Write Stuff by Jane Considine to help our children on the road to becoming fluent readers.

Implementation

The children are learning to write through ‘The Write Stuff’ approach. This was developed by teacher and leading English consultant, Jane Considine. It is a fun, creative and rigorous approach to develop writers.  We start writing from enjoying and sharing books and stories, placing a strong emphasis on a love of literature. 

'The Write Stuff' follows a method called 'Sentence Stacking' which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.  An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections: 

Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence. Children 'chot' (chat and jot) down their ideas in the initiate phase from stimulating resources, such as pictures, music and drama.

Model section – the teacher then models sentence scaffolds that outlines clear writing features and techniques taken from the 'Writing Rainbow'.

Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.

Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.

Through regular reading, we want children to build up an extensive and rich vocabulary for use in their own writing and this word collecting is an integral part of the write stuff approach. 

Regular opportunities are taken for children to practise their writing skills independently both in English and across the curriculum. We aim to provide a balance of narrative, non-fiction and poetry throughout each term.  

Within all aspects of writing we focus on handwriting and presentation. Click on the link below for activities to do at home.

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/english/primary-handwriting/

Within this website there are activities and sheets to download to help your child to improve and develop their handwriting.

To enable families to ensure that they are kept informed about what their children are learning in ‘writing’ we have produced some Knowledge Organisers which clearly show what each child should be able to do in each different year group.