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Overview
At Lavender Primary School we follow ‘The Write Stuff’ schema by Jane Considine. We use this programme in order to develop a love of writing and encourage a fluent writing style for our pupils. ‘The Write Stuff’ follows a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’, whereby the children collaborate to build sentences as a class. The children then use (and extend) these ideas by applying the shared learning to their own writing. This approach ensures that all of our children are exposed to high quality texts that stimulate quality responses to reading, high quality writing and purposeful speaking and listening opportunities. Our writing curriculum at Lavender ensures that all children have opportunities to write for a variety of different purposes and audiences through the study of high quality and engaging texts.
Overview (1).pdfA Writing Lesson
An individual writing lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into 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 closely models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
Enable section – the children use the model to help build their own sentence.
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 writing chunk.
In ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to writing, the children explore high level, rich vocabulary and are taught grammar in context through different writing lenses on the Writing Rainbow. There are three zones of writing, which are used to support children with their 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.
Writing at Lavender is structured around our Big Ideas, which are: Text Structure, Sentence Structure, Vocabulary, Word Classes and Punctuation. These Big ideas enable both teachers and children to link their knowledge across the curriculum and helps with the retention of knowledge taught in writing lessons. These Big Ideas ensure progression, coverage and a balance of skills across the writing curriculum.
Spelling
At Lavender, we teach spelling through the Spelling Shed programme. This approach is based on phonics, morphology and etymology and provides lesson structures and additional activities for the children to consolidate their understanding of spelling rules and patterns. We teach the spelling patterns outlined in the National Curriculum and we do so in a fun and engaging way. Through this programme, the children can engage in spelling competitions with their peers and complete spelling games to help build their confidence with each spelling pattern.
Each child at Lavender is given their own login and password for the Spelling Shed website. Each week, your child’s teacher will set them an assignment, which links to the spelling pattern and spellings they have been learning in class:
Spelling Shed MTP - MTP (1).pdf
Handwriting
At Lavender we follow the online Letter-join programme to ensure a fluent and neat cursive handwriting style for all, focusing on letter formation and developing a stamina for writing. Letter-join is an online resource that follows the National Curriculum’s expectations for handwriting. All children can access Letter-join in school and at home.
This resource allows the children to refine their handwriting skills and practice these in a fun, interactive manner. We use Letter-join at Lavender to not only develop children's handwriting but also their reading and spelling ability.
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