English - Writing

At Diseworth C of E Primary School, our aim is for all learners to grow into confident, imaginative and fluent writers who are able to use a range of writing techniques, tools and styles. We have based our approach on "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing.  We believe this approach will enable our children to became accomplished, creative writers within a positive classroom environment

All our writing is taught through the ‘Writing Rainbow’ which provides a lens for the writer to focus through in order to ensure all writing is effective and engaging for the reader, whilst meeting the intended purpose. 

"The Write Stuff" uses three essential components to support children in becoming great writers.

The three zones of writing:

For EYFS

• IDEAS - The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.

• TOOLS – The CATALYTICs. Spark and initiate quality talk into writing to enable the children to write vividly.

• TECHNIQUES – The REALISTICs exposing children to the real-world writing types making writing purposeful for the children.

For KS1 and KS2

• IDEAS - The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children can craft their ideas.

• TOOLS - The GRAMMARISTICs. The grammar rules of our language system and an accessible way to target weaknesses in pupils grammatical and linguistic structures.

• TECHNIQUES - The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual. 

"The Write Stuff" is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. As part of the teaching sequence, teachers plan experience days; sentence stacking lessons and independent writing sequences. Experience sessions immerse children in experiences linked to their writing and drenches them in vocabulary linked to the lenses in the ‘Writing Rainbow’. From the experience days pupils take part in "Sentence Stacking" sessions. This is a process where 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.  Each individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:

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

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