Teaching Writing Strategies in Primary School

Empirical studies, Graham 2016, prove that the quality of students writing can be improved by teaching writing strategies, explicitly teaching the characteristics of different types of texts, sentence construction, spelling, handwriting and motivational beliefs.

In the Primary School, we have adopted the ‘Writing Rope approach’ which specifically teaches word, sentence, paragraph and text level construction. This is further reinforced using Writer’s Toolbox resource.

Research states that teaching sentence construction skills has a 21 percentile-point jump in writing quality.

When students are given more time to write, there is a 12 percentile point jump in writing quality. The teachers have a goal for the boys to write for 60 minutes per day for different purposes-to persuade, to gather information, chronical personal experiences, create imaginary worlds, note take, summarise, write generalisation for science

The Primary Staff have been using Writer’s Toolbox AI for 12 months. This resource analyses student writing, providing structure and instant feedback. It provides diagnostics on individual and grade performance as well as identifying trends across classes and cohorts.

The data from the past 12 months confirms-

• The boys are writing more in each 10-minute period- 86 words in 2024 compared to 107 words in 2025
• The boy’s seeking feedback is 4 times the level from 2024 to 2025
• Precision when writing texts has increases from 49% to 51%
• Average writing strength has increased from 57% to 60 %
• Improvements made based on Ai feedback has jumped from 11,721 to 45,180
• Daily writing challenges have increased from 1,992 to 2,725
• Average increase in writing strength has improved from 63% value add to 135% value add