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Recently all teaching staff attended the Seven Steps to Writing training. Seven Steps to Writing Success is a program that empowers teachers to inspire their students to rapidly improve their writing skills, and most importantly, learn to love writing! Teachers use the resources and explicit instruction to focus on the authorial aspect of students writing. This gets students to focus on seven characteristics authors use consistently in their writing.  

The Seven Steps include:

1. Plan for Success
2. Sizzling Starts
3. Tightening Tension
4. Dynamic Dialogue
5. Show, Don’t Tell
6. Ban the Boring
7. Endings with impact

Even though there are seven steps, learning will often begin with sizzling starts before moving on to other steps. Did you know you only have seven seconds to engage a reader? As educators we want students to be continually thinking about how they can make more choices in their own writing to make it as engaging as possible. You may hear terms at home such as pebble, rock and boulder for tightening tension or using dynamic dialogue. 

This is now a whole school approach to authorial choices in which we hope to see a big impact on students' writing. Why don’t you ask students what they are currently learning about in their writing?