Teach-Reading-and-Writing-Issue-22

30 | www.teachwire.net use of sentences within their writing. However, there may be some underlying wobbliness – and for children who are not voracious readers, where to place that end-of-sentence punctuation can remain a mystery. We cannot leave this skill to chance. We want our children to have a range of sentence constructions to hand so they can begin to choose the most appropriate with fluency, conveying their meaning precisely to their intended audience. So what can we do to support the development of sentence skills? A holistic approach The importance of explicit sentence structure teaching is emphasised in the draft writing framework, published in July 2025. However, it is important to note that this shouldn’t result in the teaching of sentences in isolation. Instead, they need to be taught within the context of the whole piece to create meaning. Sentence-level instruction forms part of a holistic approach to writing instruction, which leads to effective outcomes. Pleasingly, the writing framework refers to the importance of the early years. It stresses that quality interactions between children and adults, alongside D on’t forget your full stops!” was something I said a lot in my early teaching career. I soon realised that this lack of punctuation could be owing to one of two things: • The children needed to be taught how to proofread as they were, understandably, unable to attend to punctuation at the point of drafting, due to cognitive overload. • Pupils lacked understanding of the grammatical conventions of a sentence. By asking children “What is a sentence?” and analysing their writing, I could determine what I needed to teach to support their understanding and control of language. Looking at structures I regularly found myself addressing this challenging area of primary English with specific teaching around sentence structure. Children who struggle with end-of-sentence punctuation, or who stick to sentence constructions that they are comfortable with, most often require some explicit teaching to transform spoken language into a more controlled, concise written form. Confident readers, who are consuming varied sentence constructions daily through their reading mileage, often appear to be more secure around their provision with language at the heart, supports children to develop a wide range of language structures. We need to attune children’s ears to different language structures, including the sound of a sentence, by providing opportunities for them to hear, see, read, speak and write correctly structured sentences again and again. Included in the writing framework is guidance around the types of sentence constructions we should be teaching our primary-age children. This highlights the importance of teachers knowing the curriculum. Time spent as a school developing subject knowledge around this strand of the curriculum, and shoring up teachers’ knowledge of and use of terminology appropriate for each year group, is key to building strong foundations in this area of learning. A shared understanding of what to teach, and when, then allows for planned opportunities for children to spend time taking sentence structures to fluency without rushing ahead. This then frees up their cognitive load to add flourishes to their writing with the use of carefully chosen vocabulary, whilst thinking about the purpose of their writing and who they are writing for. Sentence essentials Don’t rush ahead Know your programme of study, but also what children need to know and understand from their learning in previous year groups. We wouldn’t teach multiplying mixed fractions to a child who doesn’t know their times tables yet, so why would we teach relative clauses if a child needs to secure their use of single-clause sentences? Those single-clause sentences are as important in Y6 as they are in Y1 to communicate meaning. Model, model, model! Use metacognitive talk whilst live writing so children can hear and see your choices as a writer. An example of this is shown in the panel opposite. Check your sentences Model checking your sentences are correct using a sentence checker, so that children can then emulate this within their own writing. As teachers, we ask children to check their writing for correct Getting to THE POINT If you want children to write with confidence and fluency, don’t leave their sentence structure skills to chance, warns Amanda Webb ... “We cannot leave this skill to chance” “