Ian Filer
All teaching staff and class based ancillary staff (SSOs and BSSOs) participated in the ‘7 Steps Writing’ Workshop on Monday, with over 60 staff involved. As parents are aware, Writing is one of 3 priorities (Challenges of Practice) that we are focussing on as a school this year. Writing is a high priority and will feature strongly with regard to our training and development throughout this year. The 7 Steps for Writing are: 1. Plan for Success 2. Sizzling Starts 3. Tightening Tension 4. Dynamic Dialogue 5. Show, Don’t Tell 6. Ban the Boring 7. Exciting Endings. For example, ‘Sizzling Starts’ are very important as you only have a few seconds to grab the reader’s interest! Make your start sizzling:start with action, use humour, make your reader curious, use dialogue or start with action!
We have a small Writing Committee comprising Jan, Vanessa and Lucas whose role is, amongst other things, to develop a plan for next term that will outline a whole school approach for the teaching of writing. We strongly believe in the importance of all being on the ‘same page’ and using the same language with all our students across our school.
We will continue to update parents as the next term progresses.
Ian