Lockdown Learnin'

Sentence structure is one of those things the Hermiones amongst us just... know. They can see if a sentence looks odd and can go in and fix it without really being taught much about the actual structure. If you have a Hermione as a child, congratulations! Their sentences will probably be structured correctly and they won't need much input from you. However, there's a reason why there's only one Hermione in Hogwarts and, as I said before, an education system based on what the nerdiest can  automatically  do isn't a very fair one. If you know how to help your child reach the next level of sentence building, you can help them not only with their writing, but their communication in general. But first, some definitions: What is a sentence? In short, a sentence is a complete thought which contains a subject  and a verb . Take this: Tiddles   pounced. Tiddles is the subject  and is the subject of the sentence, which means the sentence is about her and what sh...

First, a protracted simile. In the UK education system, the English language is like a mechanic's toolbox and a piece of writing like a bike. You learn how to use the tool and then you bash the bike with it, hoping it'll fix it. You learn about another, more useful tool, and hope to bash the bike a bit more effectively. By the end of the Year 2, you've learned how to use the basic tools and, though the bike is pretty beaten up, you can go forward to build up your tool box with other, more refined tools to fix the bike so it's pretty tricked out by the end of Year 6. The idea is that the tools make the bike flashy and cool and your Year 7 child can use that bike to travel through secondary school, knowing when to dig into their toolbox in case anything goes wrong. The problem for teachers and students alike is that it doesn't seem like a toolbox at all, more like a garage of fiddly tools. It can sometimes feel like it all needs to be learned at once, and for...

Here it is. Adverbs. Bare in mind, adverbs are a huge word class. It's far larger than can be explained in a single post, so, like always, this will focus more on the lower end of the school spectrum, with the depth of learning ramping up as we go on. Ready? Here we go: Adverbs Adverbs describe how an action is done. In Year 2, we want children to be expanding their vocabulary and describing different ways an action is done. Look at this sentence, where the verb (see the last post) is 'jumped': The dog jumped happily. The adverb 'happily' describes how the dog jumped. Your Year 2 can also put the adverb before the verb: The dog happily jumped. If they want to add extra flavour. In Year 2, adverbs are usually spotted by their '-ly' suffix, but just explaining adverbs like this leads to mistakes in writing (otherwise known as 'misconceptions, because 'mistake' is a big old scary word for 7 year olds):  The dog  bigly  jumped . The d...

Hi again, Part two of word groups (or word classes) are verbs. I will absolutely talk about phrases, clauses and sentences as well, but in their own time with their own wee post, because, though not massively complicated, it doesn't do to overload people with information (as I've been told in many a high stakes lesson observation. Ahh, memories).  Bare this in mind actually - if your child is just not getting it, and you can see that it's more than a sulk at being asked to do work, strip everything back to basics and praise, praise, praise for everything they can get right. Chances are, taking a step back and looking at a problem again (be it maths, science, or anything else) won't do the trick. There's no point in trying to paint the Mona Lisa if you don't know how to hold a brush, right? It's the same for SPaG. Your 11 year old might be the brightest button in the class, but it's also been an entire week since anything could even remotely be call...

Ah, SPaG. Spelling Punctuation and Grammar (or, as a 10-year-old child who revealed his middle class power level called it, Spaghetti Parmesan and Garlic) is the catch all for the entirety of English grammar. The UK government, in all its wisdom, decided in 2014 that all primary school children should be able to rattle off and use grammar terms as if they were second nature. That these are not really used in secondary school doesn't seem to matter - what we want to create by the end of Year 6 is a bunch of grammar nerds who can construct sentences naturally and, if a sentence isn't working, be able to mechanically go into it and fix it, or improve it. But it's all very well if your child's teacher has set a bunch of fronted adverbial tasks if you, dear parent, need to crack open a dictionary yourself for what a fronted adverbial actually is.  Fronted adverbials have been the cause of a lot  of parent's evening drama for me. However, I actually am a grammar nerd ...