English

Jane Considine Writing Approach

At Thompson Primary School we have adopted ‘The Write Stuff’ by Jane Considine to bring clarity and consistency to the mechanics of writing and to enable our children to write effectively and coherently. This was developed by teachers and leading English consultant, Jane Considine. It is a fun, creative and rigorous approach to develop children’s writing. This approach 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 is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. 

 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 give them a range of vocabulary.  From the experience days, children take part in the sentence stacking lessons. 

 ‘The Write Stuff’ follows a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’ 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. 

 An individual lesson is based on one plot point from the text, broken in to three learning chunks: 

  • 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 teacher’s model. 

Among The Write Stuff lessons, we also teach additional GPS lessons to give the children all the tools they need to be good independent writers.