The Writing Revolution

St Joseph's Staff Professional Development

The St Joseph’s school staff are on a constant learning journey to provide the best learning experiences and opportunities for the students. We pride ourselves on delivering evidence-based instruction through professional reading, staff meetings and professional learning teams (PLT). Using our students’ data the staff meet twice a week to discuss ways to implement the current research into our teaching practice.

Even whilst we are all learning remotely, the staff at St Joseph’s has continued their professional development through the weekly staff meetings and PLT sessions (professional learning teams). Our current focus is on the improvement of student writing from Prep to Year 6. We are using a variety of evidence-based research texts, but our main book is titled “The Writing Revolution" by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler. It provides clear evidence-based methodology for building writing fluency. As a staff we have discussed the complexities of writing such as planning thoughts and ideas sequentially, organisation of a text, sustaining effort, grammar, punctuation, the audience and purpose of the writing, self-monitoring, editing, spelling and letter formation. An individual’s working memory can only hold a limited number of items simultaneously, which means that the complex task of writing places heavy demands on this aspect of cognition or executive functions.

You may have recently noticed that all of the students at St Joseph’s have been focusing on sentence structure in their writing lessons. This is because sentences are the building blocks of all writing.

“A writer who cannot compose a decent sentence will never produce a decent essay – or even a decent paragraph (“The Writing Revolution”, p 10).

All students at St Joseph’s have been provided with explicit instructions on how to create sentences, including:

The four basic sentence types and corresponding punctuation
Conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions
Independent clauses and subordinate clauses
Sentence expansion and combining
Note-taking – keywords and phrases

The students have all worked very hard on some or all of these areas, depending on their level, and we are extremely proud of the improvement in student writing as a result of our explicit teaching. I would also like to thank our dedicated and passionate staff, who are always willing to implement the best evidence-based teaching practices for the benefit of all of our students. We also thank our parent community for working so hard to support student writing at home.

Please see below for some recent examples of the students' writing.

Amanda Jackson

Literacy Leader

Amazing Reading Responses from our Preps!

The Preps have been busy reading lots of books lately! They have been working very hard and have written some amazing responses to the stories they have been reading. Here are some samples from our fantastic Preps!

Grade 4 Literacy Tasks

Planning - By Manuela

Introduction:	I wore them for a week to see how good they were and the great I wore them to school, to the park for sport and for a walk.
Paragraph 1:Good points	They are comfortable there, my most favourite colour in the world purple. They are very protective and super good quality. The patterns are so pretty and very my style. The shape of the shoe is tall. And of course, they are Nike, my favourite brand. They are nice and wide which is super good because my foot is wide so they fit like a glove. They are amazingly colourful. And the laces are perfectly breaded onto the shoe.
Paragraph 2:suitability for sports	They made me run like a cheetah in the sport today, the sole is very bouncy so I won the sprinting competition. They are very supportive. They did not give me any sores or blisters they weren't stiff and they were flexible so they are really good to run in.
Paragraph 3: what needs to be improved	Well the runners are really good so there is not much to say. I think there should be more colour options for other people's taste. And to make them even cooler lights in the sole.
Conclusion: Overall opinion	The shoe is really good very fashionable and cool.

Planning - By Sophie

Introduction:	I tried them for a week. Suitability for sports, good or bad? What needs improving on the shoes? Overall?
Paragraph 1:Good points	The soles of the shoes were firm and good quality. Because they are made a gelatin glue. Shoelaces are easy to tie, soft. Looks - colourful, shiny and gold. Feels - soft, comfortable, not too tight, good. Not too tight but there is still space for you to wiggle your toes around and move them.
Paragraph 2:suitability for sports	They stretch so when you’re running there not the tight and fixed. The shoes give you good support around you’re ankle so you don’t fall over and hurt. There is lots of soft, comfortable cushioning on the under the foot so there isn’t as much pressure on you foot
Paragraph 3: what needs to be improved	The design needs some work, it’s a bit plain and bland. The front of the shoe started to split so the structure is a bit weak. The shoelace holes are roughly and harshly cut so it is hard to put the shoelace in.
Conclusion: Overall opinion	The shoe looks ok but plain, needs a tiny bit of work. They are great for sport and stretch like a rubber band. Feel amazing and very soft and smooth on the bottom of the shoe. Did start to split a little but they held up. Overall they were ok to wear and are amazing for sport.

Grade 2 creating complex sentences

Here are some examples of the Grade 2 work over the last 2 weeks showing that they have been developing a really good understanding of how to use the conjunctions 'because', 'but' and 'so' to craft complex sentences that show their comprehension of the class novel, Charlotte's Web.