Focus on writing

Our school's goal for this year is to enhance student writing skills across all grade levels. We are implementing a whole-school approach to achieve this, integrating writing into every subject to ensure consistent and effective strategies. 

Our guiding resource for this effort is The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, which provides a comprehensive guide to fostering critical thinking through structured writing instruction. The Writing Revolution offers an excellent framework for systematically teaching writing. It presents strategies for explicitly teaching students how to enhance the complexity and depth of their writing.

To kick off this initiative, we will be running a Curriculum Day in Week 5. During this event, James Pinnuck from Ticking Minds will outline our writing improvement goal and explain its significance. The majority of the day will be dedicated to teacher training, allowing teachers to familiarise themselves with the principles and strategies outlined in The Writing Revolution. 

The training will focus on four key strategies for teaching sentence-level improvements, which will become embedded in our curriculum to support students to improve their mechanics of writing. 

The four strategies that we will emphasise in our writing instruction are:

1. Identifying sentence fragments
2. Using Subordinating Conjunctions
3. Appositives
4. Because, But, So.

By focusing on these key strategies, we aim to develop students’ ability to construct clear, compelling and complex written work. This whole school approach ensures that every subject will contribute to the development of strong writing skills.