Building Better Sentences: Strategies for Developing Writing Skills
Help students construct better sentences with practical strategies. Learn approaches for developing sentence variety, complexity, and precision from early years through secondary.
Sentence Building and Blockplay
This brief post highlights the fascinating findings from Rob Francksen's research project which focused on improving the quality of KS2 writing.
The fundamental purpose of this research was to undertake an exploratory investigation into whether Structural Learning could improve Upper Key Stage Two pupil’s writing and the processes of composition, based upon the REAch2 Academy Trust Assessment Without Levels Milestones criteria, and focusing on:
- The construction of effective sentences, in particular through the use of sentence-combining skills, by employing a variety of syntactical forms;
- The cognitive processes of writing including ‘personal meaning making,’ making better connections by prioritizing, sequencing, manipulating and building on ideas and learning patterns for what thinking and writing looks like;
- The engagement of feedback in making the thought-processes of writing more visible.
