The Write Stuff

We have recently enrolled in an online course with Jane Considine, called The Write stuff. The focus of this initiative is to transform the teaching of writing, while following carefully considered guidelines that flow in a logical teaching sequence. This logic encompasses sentence stacking lessons, experience lessons, plot building lessons and ensures students have the right language, leaving nothing to chance.

Jane's work embodies The Writing Rainbow. This includes 3 different overarching themes:
Fantastics: Feeling, asking, noticing, touching, action, smelling, tasting, imagining, checking.
Grammaristics: Adverbs and Adverbial phrases, Basic, Sentence structures, dialogue and contracted forms, purpose, paragraphs, passive voice, past and present tense, punctuation.
Boomtastics: Ononmatopoeia, alliteration, rhyme, repetition, simile, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, pun, personification.

Each element of the writing rainbow has its own image to go with the instruction, which is helpful for students.

My experience with Jane Considine's work has significantly changed my practice and this has resulted in seeing students complete better quality pieces of writing and students have shown increased confidence in what they are producing. I have particularly enjoyed introducing Jane's shade' o' meters and thesaurus thinking to support improved vocabulary in a piece of writing. Also her sentence stacking lessons have been fun to deliver. In a sentence stacking lesson a particular chunk of writing is modelled. As a follow up we have focussed on  exposing 3 writing challenges which students have taken on by in their independent writing. The teaching and scaffolding is explicit and students go away to work on their own chunk with lots of modelling and support around the elements of challenge presented to them. On the day we share our writing, students have shown an increased willingness to share and appear to be prouder of what they have created.