Intent

The national curriculum sets out expectations for children’s writing skills from year one to year six. In the introduction to the programmes for each block of study, yearly for key stage one and two-yearly for key stage two, it is clear that children need to be exploring a variety of sentence structures and drawing on this learning when composing their own writing. ‘Teachers should therefore be consolidating pupils’ writing skills, their vocabulary, their grasp of sentence structure and their knowledge of linguistic terminology… Teachers should make sure that pupils build on what they have learnt, particularly in terms of the range of their writing and the more varied grammar, vocabulary and narrative structures from which they can draw to express their ideas,’ (Lower Key Stage Two programme of study forward, p. 33).  This is echoed in both the year two and upper key stage two programmes of study and, interestingly, is highlighted as important for those children not currently meeting expectations in upper key stage two. Even though children’s decoding skills may be poor, they should still be, ‘hearing and learning new vocabulary and grammatical structures, and having a chance to talk about all of these’, (Upper key stage two programme of study forward, p. 41). 

At Darley Dale, it seems that Alan Peat’s ‘exciting sentences’ will ensure that we are meeting this aspect of the national curriculum, giving the children the opportunity to explore a variety of sentence structures across the key stages. In addition, children and teachers will have the opportunity to meet the expectations of the national curriculum, exploring a range of punctuation in context. For example, now children are required to use dashes to mark parentheses in year five, children can explore the ‘Name – adjective pair – sentences’ and see dashes at work in context. This can then be applied and extended in their writing. We have found that the use of the sentences has helped the teachers’ subject knowledge and they are confident to teach this complex punctuation and are even beginning to use them in their own writing. 

Implementation

In order to meet the demands of the national curriculum, we have created a policy for progression, which introduces these ‘exciting sentences’ at the right time to coincide with the expectations of the national curriculum. There are a minimum of three sentences and a maximum of six in each year group, which means that these sentence types can be explored and extended throughout the year so that they are completely embedded in the child’s sentence repertoire. Also, many of the sentence types can be applied to narrative, non-fiction and even poetry so children will have ample time to understand this. Of course, in the first few years we will be playing a game of catch up, exploring the sentence types from year three and four with year five for example, but ultimately we aim to have a progression across the school where the children’s learning of sentence types builds from year to year. By the end of year six, we hope that children will have a repertoire of 20+ exciting sentence types in their arsenal as well as the sentences types that they have derived following the exploration of the target sentences. 

As well as the sentence types applied to each year group, we also have additional sentence types, which could be used in each year group. These sentences are particularly focused on figurative language and will give teachers the opportunity to explore complex narrative techniques with children when it is appropriate in their learning journey. As a school we need to focus on using poetry as a tool for extending vocabulary and meaning so these sentence types will be used to support this. We have not selected all of the sentence types to be used in our progression policy, but many of the sentence types from Alan Peat’s ‘Writing exciting sentences’ and many from his ‘A second book of writing exciting sentences’ have been included. We will continue to review this progression policy and adapt as we feel is necessary.