Writing at New Christ Church

As a school we have adopted “The Write Stuff” by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing. It is a clear, consistent and research informed approach which aligns to the techniques of modelling, scaffolding, questioning and feedback which are used across all areas of learning in the school to promote high quality learning in the classroom. The Write Stuff will help us to create ‘impact writers’ who understand that when they are writing they need to consider the impact of the language choices: they will know that everything they write has an impact on the reader.

Each unit is based on a high-quality text.  Children journey through the text with their class and identify key 'plot points’.

At each plot point children are carefully guided by their teachers to use the 'Writing Rainbow' to identify:

● The FANTASTICs which are an acronym that summarise the ideas of writing

● The GRAMMARISTICs are a classroom tools that enables the teacher to drive key grammar messages.

● The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 9 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing.

Teaching sequences slide between experience days, sentence stacking lessons, and independent writing. ‘Sentence Stacking’ is a method 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. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow