Lockdown Learnin'

Yesterday I talked about the three types of sentences we teach to Year 2. Now, it's time for the three sentence structures we teach the littl'uns. Bare in mind that these sentence types are revisited over and over throughout primary school, so whatever age your child, you'll probably find this helpful. Simple sentences A simple sentence has one clause . What is a clause? Why, it's a group of words with a verb in it! How is it different to a phrase ? A phrase doesn't have any verbs in it! This sentence: William played on his phone. Has a single clause, as all the information is about William and what he did to which device.  To include a phrase in this sentence, you could write in noun phrases: Bored   William  played on his phone. William played on his expensive phone.  Or adverbial phrases: William played happily  on his phone. Yesterday afternoon,  William played on his phone. Compound sentences A compound sentence is a sentence w...

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...