English Writing
Hello, my name is Mr McManus and I am the Writing Lead at Sherdley Primary School. I joined the school in September 2021 and I have led on improving spelling and writing across the school since Febuary 2022. I’m also the History Co-ordinator at Sherdley.
At Sherdley 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.
"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.
To enable our children to write effectively and coherently we teach using 'The Write Stuff'. This approach is used from Year 1 to Year 6 and allows children to apply basic skills, vocabulary and grammar knowledge to write effective sentences, which are full of impact and keep the reader interested. 'The Write Stuff' brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced though the 'Writing Rainbow', using the three zones of writing:
From 'The Writing Rainbow', symbols are used to support children within their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.
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 lense of their choice. Independent writing sequences give children the opportunity to showcase everything they've learnt in their experience days and sentence stacking lessons.
Over their time at Sherdley, 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.
All Sherdley pupils have now been assigned a login to the Spelling Shed site. This site is designed to help pupils to learn spellings in a fun and engaging way. Spelling lists are assigned individually to all pupils, to match their stage of learning.
Spelling Shed is a simple, fun web-game that is playable through any internet browser on phones, tablets or computers. Each week, pupils will be assigned a spelling rule that they have been focussing on in class, pupils can also select ‘More Lists’ if they would like to revisit past assignments.
To ensure your child is given a level of challenge appropriate to them, they can choose from four levels of difficulty. The game is also designed to be dyslexic-friendly.
- Easy – The word is shown, an audio clip is played and only the included letters are shown.
- Medium – An audio clip is played and only the included letters are shown.
- Hard – An audio clip is played and the included letters, plus some random letters are shown.
- Extreme – An audio clip is played and a full qwerty keyboard is shown. Letters must be correctly accented and capitalised.
All users have an avatar that can be personalised by using honeypots. Honeypots are earned by spelling words correctly. Pupils can also keep track of how their score compares to other pupils. The more you play the higher the score you will achieve.
Your child will be given an individual Spelling Shed login in order to play games which practise their weekly spelling list. Please contact your class teacher if you do not know your child's login.
During Black History Month, 1D researched the life and work of famous poet Benjamin Zephaniah. They created a booklet with some interesting facts all about him. Here are some pictures of the children finding out about Benjamin Zephaniah. They throughly enjoyed finding out about his life and especially listening to some of his poems.
