Thorndon C of E Primary School

At Thorndon Primary, we strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. We maintain through each key stage and year group that we want our children to develop their vocabulary understanding, write in a range of different genres and continuously develop their spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. As well as this, we want our children to understand the spoken word, use expression and participate as a member of society by speaking fluently and articulately.

To enable our children to write effectively and coherently we teach Writing using 'The Write Stuff' approach by Jane Considine. This approach is used from EYFS 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:

• 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.

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.

An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:

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

1. Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.

3. Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.

Children are also given the opportunity to 'Deepen The Moment' and add more to their writing using a lens 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 Thorndon, 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.

Handwriting begins in Reception where they learn to mark make and move to correctly form letters and numbers. Letter formation follows our teaching Read Write Inc. Phonics and this continues in Year 1.

From Year 2 onwards, the children are taught to join their handwriting using a cursive style, which is the recommended style from the National Handwriting Association. An example of cursive letter formation can be seen below:

Please see the following useful documents for more information about handwriting: