At Thorpe Acre Junior School, we have adopted ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to writing by Jane Considine to bring clarity and consistency to the mechanics of writing and to enable our children to write effectively and coherently.

As a school, all children from Year 3 to Year 6, learn to write through using the approaches within ‘The Write Stuff’ scheme of work. It is a fun, creative and rigorous approach to developing children’s writing that allows for modelling and vocabulary exploration to be at the heart of the units they cover. The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. Over their time at Thorpe Acre Junior School, children will write a range of genres focused on high-quality texts. The chosen texts and genres cover a wide range of themes, including cultural, social, and physical diversity.  All fiction texts are explored through a central character, where the children put themselves in their position and focus on the highs and lows of story events and discuss the range of emotions from plot point to plot point.

As part of the teaching sequence, teachers plan experience days, sentence stacking lessons, and independent writing sequences. Experience days immerse children in experiences linked to their writing and drench them in vocabulary linked to the lenses in 'The Writing Rainbow'. From the experience days, children take part in the sentence stacking lessons. Sentence stacking lessons include effective demonstration writing from the teacher and the writing of three high-quality sentences with focuses on lenses of the rainbow. Children are also given the opportunity to 'Deepen The Moment' and add more to their writing using a lens of their choice. Independent writing sequences give children the opportunity to showcase everything they've learnt in their experience days and sentence stacking lessons.

In ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to writing, children explore high level, rich vocabulary and are taught grammar in context through different writing lenses on the Writing Rainbow. There are three lenses used to support children with their writing:

Fantastics        –  ideas for writing
Grammaristics –  tools for writing
Boomtastics    –  specific writing techniques

By using this approach, children can apply basic skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge to write effective sentences, which are full of impact and keep the reader interested. By using this approach, it is our aim that all children should be able to:

• write for a range of purposes
• use their vast knowledge of vocabulary to excite, inform, or entertain the reader
• understand a range of punctuation and the effect it can have on the reader in both writing and reading
• understand and be able to use a range of grammatical devices
• understand the various sentence types that can be used to support different genres
• spell accurately using their phonetic knowledge and apply spelling rules
• to speak clearly, fluently and coherently, to be able to listen attentively with understanding, pleasure and empathy and contribute to group discussions

2023/2024