Writing

At St Margaret’s at Hasbury, staff recognise that the teaching of English underpins a child’s ability to access all areas of the curriculum through the development of fluent reading and an ability to organise and communicate their ideas effectively on paper.

As a school, we have adopted "The Write Stuff"- an approach to the teaching of writing developed by Jane Constantine which brings clarity to  the mechanics of writing.  "The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" whereby children are taught to effectively write sentences that are stacked together chronologically and organised as paragraphs.  Teaching aims to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.

Throughout a unit of writing, teachers provide opportunities to delve into a text  using different mediums, e.g. drama, trips and or visitors when appropriate. Modelled writing lessons will make up the majority of a teaching unit. Teachers slowly reveal different plot points that they will model over the course of a lesson on a graph. Each lesson is divided up into three distinct ‘chunks’ of learning: initiate (positive or negative word gathering from a particular stimulus), model- the teacher models the particular type of sentence to be taught from ‘The Writing Rainbow’ indicating whether the writing intent is positive or negative, enable- the children write their own version using the collected vocabulary and the teacher models as a scaffold.

Our writing overview has been carefully planned to include texts that are a mixture of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The subject matter of the writing units have been chosen to help develop our children's knowledge and understanding of the wider world. Where possible our non-fiction writing units are linked to the curriculum so that children's writing skills are strengthened using knowledge that they have already acquired.