At Raunds Park Infant School, we have adopted ‘The Write Stuff’ by Jane Considine as our approach for teaching children to write.
‘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 immediately apply to their own writing.
An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into ‘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 models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence following their 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.
- IDEAS – The FANTASTICs uses a child friendly acronym to represent the nine idea lenses through which children 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.
More information about ‘The Write Stuff’ can be found on Jane’s website - https://www.thetrainingspace.co.uk/
Jane has also produced an array of videos on her You Tube channel including example lessons as well as information videos - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheTrainingSpace/videos