Writing at Whitehouse Primary
Writing
At Whitehosue Primary School, we have based our approach on "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics 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 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:
- 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.
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 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing in a vivid visual.
Handwriting
At Whitehouse Primary School we are very proud of our pupil’s handwriting and take particular care in our cursive/joined-up handwriting style. We use Letter-join as the basis of our handwriting policy that covers all the requirements of the 2014 National Curriculum.
Handwriting is a basic skill that influences the quality of work throughout the curriculum. At the end of Key Stage 2 all pupils should have the ability to produce fluent, legible and, eventually, speedy joined-up handwriting, and to understand the different forms of handwriting used for different purposes.
We aim to make handwriting an automatic process that does not interfere with creative and mental thinking.
As a catalyst to speedy handwriting we encourage parents and carers to use the Letter-join resources at home and can arrange for free access to the Home Edition of Letter-join.
Some useful resources are below, to help and support your child's handwriting:
Spelling
Spelling is taught through the Spelling Shed scheme. In each year group, children will be taught specific spelling rules which they will build on and use throughout the scheme.
Spelling is taught through a range of strategies including fun activities and games to embed the spelling rules and list taught for that year group. These strategies include Battleships, The Spelling Web, Scrabble, Memory Challenge, Spelling Search and Crosswords.
Key Stage Spelling Lists
The 2014 National Curriculum identifies spelling lists that every child in each Key Stage of primary school needs to know by the end of that Key Stage. It is expected that by the end of Key Stage 1 children know the example words for year 1 and 2, as well as including almost all exception words which are used frequently in pupils’ writing. The word lists for Years 3 and 4 and Years 5 and 6 are statutory. These lists include a mixture of those words children use in their writing as well as those that are often misspelt.