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Writing
Writing
At Valley Invicta Primary School at Leybourne Chase we have adopted the “The Write Stuff” by Jane Considine to develop our children’s confidence, vocabulary, stamina, understanding and enjoyment in writing.
We begin each unit with an immersive experience or ‘Experience Day’ to increase engagement, excitement and enjoyment of the writing process. Each week we will then teach a discrete Grammar lesson followed by ‘Sentence Stacking’ lessons which refer to a sentence model broken into 3 learning chunks. Each chuck has three sections which produce sentences stacked together chronologically to engage children with short intensive learning they can then immediately apply to their own writing. The three sections are:
Initiate - In this stage, the children are immersed in a rich language discussion and activities to provide a wealth of vocabulary to aid their independent writing.
Model - In this stage, grammar and punctuation skills are taught and modelled as an integral part of the writing process. The teacher models their thought process when selecting the most effective sentence structures and vocabulary discussed during the initiate stage.
Enable - This learning chunk is the opportunity for pupils to showcase what they can do independently using the skills and vocabulary discussed and modelled in the previous stages.
Deepen the moment: Children are challenged to 'Deepen the Moment' which requires them to draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
The Write Stuff uses three essential components to bring clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing and support children in becoming excellent writers. It is introduced through the 'Writing Rainbow', using the three zones of writing:
The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.
The GRAMMARISTICS. The grammar rules of our language system and an accessible way to target weaknesses in pupils grammatical and linguistic structures.
The BOOMTASTICs. These help children to capture ten ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.
The Write Stuff approach makes sure that all of our children are exposed to high quality texts or videos that stimulate quality responses to reading, high quality writing and purposeful speaking and listening opportunities. Our curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes.
To teach spelling in Years 2 through to 6 we use the Read Write Inc Spelling programme. This is a programme which teaches all the requirements of the National Curriculum for spelling cumulatively and systematically with
deliberate, focused practice. It builds upon the teaching strategies and spelling activities from Read Write Inc. Phonics in Early Years and Key Stage One, teaching spelling in a series of short progressive activities.
