Strong Writing is a Journey
Our young people deserve to be capable writers—it’s critical to their future. Welcome to Writer’s Toolbox Learning Journey: the true changemaker.
Learning Journey is the heart of our developmental writing programme. From the first year of primary to the last year of high school, students are guided through a comprehensive series of pre-planned learning modules that teach them the relevant writing skills for their year level.
Mapping the Journey
In Learning Journey, every school year level has its own map. And age-appropriate visual themes take students step-by-step through their quest to writing mastery. From friendly animals and cartoon characters for young ones, to steampunk archetypes and androids for older users. Every map—just like a real odyssey—is rich with skills to master as students make their way through ten individualised stages.
The Writing Journey
At every stage of the Learning Journey, your student is presented with a series of learning modules—each module focusing on a single writing skill to master. Modules are mapped to the world’s major curriculum systems, supplemented by our longitudinal research study into writing instruction. You can rest assured that your students are covering what they need to succeed, and building their writing skills in a purposeful way.
The Module
We understand what it’s like to be a student: how hard it can be to learn. So we’ve gone to great pains to make knowledge transfer effective. The instructional text uses graded language along with light-hearted content, making learning fun and rapid. Discrete writing skills are reinforced with quizzes, instructional videos, interactive activities, and graded comprehension tasks. The writing skills your student masters are instantly employable.
"After four weeks, one Year 7 class could quote me the Sentence Structures and how to use them. It sinks in so easily."
Nathan Smith, Deputy Principal, Rochedale State High School
Engaging Videos
Student engagement and knowledge transfer is at the heart of Writer’s Toolbox. That’s why our modules include professionally-produced learning videos. Across a three to five-minute video segment, our module video content brings each writing skill to life. Plus, you’ll hear directly from Writer’s Toolbox founder Dr Ian Hunter, as he talks directly to students, offering hints and professional writing tips to engage and fortify their learning.
Practice Makes Perfect
Repeated practice—done in an interesting way—helps make learning permanent. But the Writer's Toolbox approach is not just dull multi-guess questions. Our educators built hundreds of bespoke writing activities to expand your student’s cognitive capacity. They’ll assimilate greater writing knowledge—and at the same time, their brain power in higher order thinking skills is expanded in areas like sequencing, synthesis, judgement, evaluation, and inference. Ready to learn?
"We were trying everything, but our results did not improve. We were looking for that answer that was a school-wide programme, and that’s what we found in Writer’s Toolbox."
Tracey Ah Boo, Head of English, Dakabin State High School
Story Challenges
The best learning is always done in context. That’s why every module in the Learning Journey contains an original comprehension task—what we call a Story Challenge. The comprehension task illustrates the form and function of the writing skill being taught with appropriately-graded language and themes. The tasks are a carefully-curated mix of narrative fiction, along with biographical, scientific, social, and historical studies.
Student can read the tasks themselves, or be read to by a professional voice artist. To ensure effective consolidation of learning, every story comes with a reading comprehension quiz, and a writing comprehension quiz testing their knowledge of the writing skill in context.
The Sentence Train
Based on research into sentence chunking and sentence combining methodologies, the Sentence Train™ method is used in sentence module activities to broaden your student’s sentencing toolkit. They’ll learn multiple ways to cast a sentence. And by arranging train pieces and punctuation into the correct order, sentence structure and punctuation rules are taught in a fun, simple, and memorable way.
With a range of sound effects, backgrounds, and train models to send even the most dedicated railroader into a frenzy, The Sentence Train gets students so invested, they won’t even realise they’re learning.
Student Agency
Across each Learning Journey map, your students can track and monitor their own progress across each stage and every module. Teacher/student conferencing has never been richer. As your students master a deeper range of writing skills, they can talk purposefully about their achievement and their goals. And for those competitive students out there—you know the ones—there’s the extra challenge of getting all three achievement stars and nailing 100 per cent module completion.
Teachers and School Leaders: We’ve Got You
To give you complete control and overview of all your students’ individual Learning Journeys, we designed the Learning Journey Manager—an intuitive and powerful tool.
You can check curriculum links, preview, and assign modules to individual students or classes, even modules outside of our pre-built Learning Journeys. At the click of a button, you get unparalleled insights into student progress. Watch how the writing skills your students acquire improve their compositional writing strength. Lock stages to stop students racing ahead. Activate an 80 per cent achievement rate requirement. You’re in control.
