At The Willows we have adopted ‘The Write Stuff’ by Jane Considine to teach writing from Year 1 to Year 6. This method allows pupils to improve their oracy skills and widen their vocabulary in every lesson, whilst deepening their understanding of different sentence types. Children at The Willows really enjoy their writing lessons and work hard to produce creative and independent pieces of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

During each writing unit, the children take part in ‘Experience Days’. These lessons allow children to engage in and learn more about the text they are focusing on. These lessons are a great opportunity to develop the children’s vocabulary and ideas for their own 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 immediately apply to their own writing. Throughout writing lessons, children continually re-visit and apply their known writing skills. Each individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken into three learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections.

1.    Initiate section – A stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.

2.    Model section – The teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.

3.    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.

Following the completion of a ‘Sentence Stacking’ sequence, children then plan and write independent texts where they are able to show the writing skills they have been developing.