Writing

Learning to Shape Our Future

We want to develop and nurture children’s love of writing, encouraging them to flourish as creative and informative writers. We aim to provide high quality learning experiences in order to develop their competence in both transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing).

We intend for our children to plan, revise and evaluate their writing effectively; be able to write down their ideas fluently, spelling words quickly and accurately using a fluent, neat and joined script. Through the development of pupil’s composition skills, we will ensure they can form, articulate and communicate ideas, organise them coherently for a reader, showing an awareness of the audience, purpose and context, and an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, which will support lifelong learning.

How We learn

Our children will enjoy learning in a literacy-rich environment, have access to high quality texts and be exposed to extensive vocabulary and experience inspiring, effective and fun learning. Children will learn through a variety of techniques, developing speaking and listening skills to promote good writing, language learning through drama and the five senses, incorporating ICT, exploring texts from a diverse range of books and using these as a vehicle for writing and writing through a broad range of genres.

The Write Stuff

Our aim is for all children to grow into confident,imaginative and fluent writers who are able to use a range of writing techniques and tools to express their journey through primary school with us.

We follow ‘The Write Stuff’ scheme – established by Jane Considine – from Year 1 Summer Term to Year 6. This scheme brings clarity to the mechanics of writing through immersion in extraordinary vocabulary and clear and concise systems in which the writer can engage their imagination.

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” ~ Hart Crane

In our lessons, the teachers follow a repeated and ‘chunked’ structure,’ where they use the three zones of writing to provide a consistent, systematic whole school approach to writing.

Each lesson is broken down into 3 learning chunks, with each chunk having three sections:

Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
Model section – the teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model but inputting their chosen vocabulary.

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.

“The Write Stuff” uses three essential writing zones to enable to children to become phenomenal writers:

The FANTASTICS – 9 lenses to structure ideas and support the children in targeted thinking, providing them with opportunities to initiate ideas and ignite imaginations.
The GRAMMARISTICS – Tools used to teach the rules of our language system so the children can carefully structure their sentences.
The BOOMTASTICS – Techniques to help children capture the attention of their audience using a range of literary devices and techniques.