I can extend my sentences...

This year, it seems my year 2 class are struggling to extend their sentences, and although they are (mostly) able to write a simple sentences, I wanted to think of some activities where the children could practise extending their sentences independently.

This is what I came up with...

 For my lower attainers, I wanted the children to continue parasitising structure of a simple sentence.  In small sandwich bags I put in cut up sentences and coloured coded them according to difficultly.  Some of the difficult sentences included 'and' as their connective.  The children loved the element of challenge, and they also seemed to love the fact they were able to read the words easily.

 My middle attainers were given a sheet with the beginnings of a sentence on (all the sentences are based on the writing we were going to be doing at the end of the week.)  They then had a pot in the middle of the table with connectives in, they had to choose a connective and then extend their sentence using that.  The children loved the fact that no matter what connective they picked out, they could extend their sentence with it!  It really worked as a scaffold to get the children to give more information in their sentence.

My high attaining children had a lot less structure.  They had 3 pots in the middle of the table, connectives, verbs and openers.  Their challenge was to write a sentence which included all the words that they had picked out.  They loved the freedom of the activity and they were coming up with sentences that they were very proud of!







So...thats all for now! My children did love these activities and I am going to see if I can put these out more permanently in my continuous provision.