At The Vine, we use The Write Stuff approach by Jane Considine to provide clarity and structure to the teaching of writing. This approach uses a method known as sentence stacking, which engages pupils in short, focused learning opportunities that they can immediately apply to their own writing.

Each lesson is built around three sentence models and is broken into three stages:

1. Initiate – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and generate vocabulary.

1. Model – the teacher models a sentence, highlighting clear writing features and techniques.

1. Enable – pupils write their own sentence, following the model provided.

 The Write Stuff is underpinned by three key components:

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 literary devices to their writing.

Over the year, pupils will complete a range of writing units, covering a range of non-fiction text types, narrative genres and poetry.

Handwriting

We take great pride in pupils’ handwriting and presentation. Our aim is to equip pupils with fluent handwriting skills so they can share their writing confidently and focus fully on the content and creativity of their work.

Handwriting development begins in the Early Years through the development of gross and fine motor skills, before letter formation is introduced. In Key Stage One, these skills are refined further, with cursive handwriting introduced in Year Two. Explicit handwriting teaching continues in Lower Key Stage Two to embed consistency, fluency and confidence.