At Brookfield Park Primary School children in Years 1-6 are taught to write through 'The Write Stuff' approach to writing. This approach focusses on developing children's confidence while at the same time developing their love of the writing process. There are a variety of fiction, non fiction and poetry units for each Year group. Long term plans showing the units being covered in each year group can be found below. 

Each Write stuff unit consists of a mix of experience days, sentence stacking lessons and grammar focussed lessons, as well as planning sessions and independent writing sessions at the end of each unit.

Experience days 

The aim of experience days is to provide children with a rich experience which they can use to develop and enhance their future writing. These lessons range in structure and content. An experience day may include drama, research or language development.

Sentence stacking sessions

Sentence stacking is the fundamental approach that underpins The Write Stuff approach to writing. This is an opportunity for children to develop their ideas, their language choices and to understand how to bring their ideas to life on a page. Sentence stacking 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. 

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​This part of the unit is heavily scaffolded with lots of teacher input and modelling of vocabulary use, sentence construction and use of grammar with reference to the 3 writing lenses. 

During the initiate section children ‘chot’ (chat and jot) down their ideas from stimulating resources, such as pictures, music and drama. The children are encouraged to use ‘kind calling out’ where they call out examples of vocabulary, adverbs, onomatopoeia etc. 

During the Model section the teacher prepares children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar and techniques of writing taken from the writing rainbow. 
In the Enable section pupils write their own sentences, taking the opportunity to deepen the moment. ‘Deepen the Moment’ is where children are challenged to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk. 

Grammar Lessons 

Grammar lessons can be used in two ways: to prepare children for future sentence stacking lessons or to act on feedback from a previous sentence stacking lesson. These lessons are to focus in deeper on a particular skill that would be unable to be taught fully during a sentence stack.

Planning Phase 

The planning phase allows children to develop their own ideas. During this phase they will plot out the structure of their text and will use the lenses to structure their writing. There will also be time during this phase to develop vocabulary and to take part in additional experience days if required.

Independent Writing

All independent writing is to take place in independent writing books. These books move up through school with children so that there is a chronology of their writing journey.

Feedback

Feedback will be given to the children throughout each lesson. Children will use purple pens to edit their writing.