English

At Ladycross, we believe that it is extremely important that children develop into confident writers so that they communicate effectively with others. Writing is a way to encourage creativity as well as the opportunity to impart information. Having a good grasp of punctuation and a broad vocabulary, enables children to share wonderful ideas with their peers and other adults.

To support writing at Ladycross, we have recently rolled out the Jane Considine program – ‘The Write Stuff.’  The program provides a step-by-step framework to convert children into successful writers with an abundance of new vocabulary, grammar and techniques 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 2 or 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’ 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 different ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.