Evidence from the EEF (May 2022) shows that Covid-related disruption has caused learning loss in children.
There is some evidence that the writing outcomes for primary-aged and Year 7 children were lower than expected compared to previous year groups (Christodoulou, 2021, 2022).
One of the common issues is that writing has been heavily impacted.
EEF’s School Planning Guided for 2022-2023, recommends that in order for writing to improve, schools need to develop pupils’ handwriting, spelling and sentence construction through extensive practice.
This advice is also echoed by Ofsted’s Research Review in English. The report clearly states that:
- Success in writing requires fluency in transcription skills.
- Repeated practice in handwriting, leads to higher success in higher-level writing tasks.
- Explicit teaching of not only spelling and handwriting, but also sentence construction, grammar and use of vocabulary, allows children to write effectively.
- Cycles of planning, drafting, revising and editing can improve writing.
Here are three top tips for stronger sentences!
Make sure that pupils understand what a sentence is. All future learning in the National Curriculum relies on this knowledge being secure.
An understanding of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ is essential understanding if all children are to write grammatically correct sentences. Having a narrow view that a verb ‘is a doing word’ is not helpful.
Children who have insecure knowledge of what a sentence is, often write ‘sentence fragments.’ To address this, Present children with sentences and non-sentences from the model text. Children to listen to the sentences/non-sentences and sort them into the correct category whilst discussing their decision. Through modelled and guided writing, covert sentence fragments to sentences.
