Woodstone Community Primary School

At Woodstone, our intention is to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach our children 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 our intention for our children to develop their vocabulary, their understanding of vocabulary, 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.

Writing at Woodstone

Writing at Woodstone is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that move between experience lessons/days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken down into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow.

Children have a clear view of what high quality writing looks like and their learning is structured clearly and misconceptions dealt with. Children know how to improve their writing and make it more focused. Feedback is provided throughout writing lessons to guide the children's learning.

Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

Key benefits of this approach to writing include:

building children's confidence with their sentence structure
widening the repertoire of writing options for children
children being able to organise their ideas
writing being more cohesive

What's new in Writing?

We have recently adopted the Jane Considine approach to writing called The Write Stuff. Every member of staff completed five days of training and have planned out some very exciting Units for the children to work with over the academic year.

Useful websites

Mr Patrick Mullins

Writing Subject Lead

Hi, I'm Mr. Mullins, the Headteacher and Writing Lead at Woodstone. I have always had a passion for writing which I think stems from winning a writing competition at primary school, way back in the old days! I absolutely loved writing stories and letting my imagination run riot. I also loved to read, so I know that definitely helped me to write better stories.
I am often amazed here at Woodstone by the brilliant writing I see happening in classrooms. It makes me grateful to be a Headteacher - I am lucky to have the opportunity to see children writing a few words when they join us in our Reception Class to writing pages and pages of high quality text by the time they leave us in Year 6.
Writing is another way for children to express themselves and that is what we are all about - encouraging children to be confident, resilient and hard working as they continue their writing journey.