To ensure high quality teaching and learning of writing we follow the Write Stuff Scheme of work.  

Why use The Write Stuff?

As a school we have adopted “The Write Stuff” by Jane Constantine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing, to realise our priority of developing children’s vocabulary and to ensure the National Curriculum is being followed.

‘The Write Stuff’ follows a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’ which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.

This approach makes sure 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.

An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to three chunks:

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. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

• 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.

Key benefits of The Write Stuff:

• Support for teachers so that they have a deeper and more flexible knowledge of sentence structure.
• Pupils who understand how to apply sentence scaffolds to their independent writing as they develop their expertise.
• Standards improve because many worked examples are provided over the year that extend understanding through a wide range of genres and non-fiction text types.
• Children have a clear view of what high quality writing looks like and their learning is structured clearly and misconceptions dealt with.
• Pupils know how to improve their writing and make it more focused and actionable feedback is provided to guide their learning.
• Children have a concept of how to build, plan and complete a piece of writing due to narrative maps and non-fiction shapes.
• Teachers have clear pathways of how to guide pupils in weak areas such as cohesion and paragraphs.