Writing at St Joseph's

Writing at St Joseph’s

Since 2019, St Joseph’s has been implementing evidence-based strategies in the writing lessons. We plan engaging and authentic writing experiences for our students. All students participate in daily sentence-level writing activities that support them in crafting sophisticated and grammatically correct sentences before applying these skills to extended pieces. 

Currently, Year Three and Four students are focusing on paragraph construction. They are learning that an effective paragraph should have one clear main idea, introduced in a topic sentence and developed with supporting details.

To teach the components for planning and constructing a well-structured sequential paragraph, the students have been explicitly taught the following syntax and grammar components:

- Sentence structure, including simple, compound and complex sentences

- Subordinate and independent clauses

- Sentence types (statement, command, question and exclamatory)

- Conjunctions, including subordinating conjunctions and sentence combining

- Expanding sentences using adverbial, adjectival and prepositional phrases

- Expanding sentences and adding fluency to the paragraph using transitional words

- Vocabulary building

- Planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing single and multi-paragraph    constructions.

Celebrating our writing at St Joseph’s.

In our main corridor, we have a “Writing Wall”—a wonderful space for students to showcase their writing to the whole school community. Theres always a buzz of excitement when a new piece is added. Many students stop to read each other’s narratives, information reports, poems, and sentence construction work. Often, the author is met with high-fives and praise from peers for their impressive efforts.

Please enjoy some of the wonderful narratives from our St Joseph’s Writing Wall. The majority of these are from Year 3, and they were written in Term 1. A few words might be misspelled as we are still mastering our spelling when constructing texts.

Amanda Jackson

Literacy Leader