'If you want to change the world, pick up a pen and write...'

At St. Joseph's,  we endeavour to create a love of writing. We want every child to leave St. Joseph's with the skills of an excellent writer who:

• Has the ability to write with fluency and has an author’s voice;
• Thinks about the impact they want their writing to have on the reader and knows how they will achieve this;
• Has a sophisticated bank of vocabulary and an excellent knowledge of writing techniques to extend details or description;
• Can structure and organise their writing to suit the genre they are writing and include a variety of sentence structures;
• Displays excellent transcription skills that ensure their writing is well presented, punctuated, spelled correctly and neat;
• Re-reads, edits and improves their writing so every piece of writing they produce is to the best of their ability and better than the last.

Throughout their time at St. Joseph's, children develop their skills by exploring a whole range of different genres, with a focus on exploring a range of models of excellence and using these to guide the drafting and editing process. It is important to note that we not only develop a real enjoyment of writing in English lessons, but in all subjects across the curriculum. We expect the highest standards of writing every time a child writes in any subject.

At St. Joseph's, we use The Write Stuff as the basis for our  English teaching. Our long term curriculum plan has been mapped out to provide opportunities for the children to revisit genres for progression across the year groups and contains linked core texts for each genre, developing a core reading spine for each class.

The Write Stuff

At St. Joseph's  Primary School,  we have adopted 'The Write Stuff' by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing.  '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 in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:

• Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
• Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
• 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.

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

The three zones of writing :-

• 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.
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The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.