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Teaching
at key stage
1
Eve Bearne, Rebecca Kennedy
and David Reedy
The United Kingdom Literacy Association
About the authors
Eve Bearne is associate editor for publications for the United Kingdom Literacy
Association (UKLA) and a Fellow of the English Association. She was a teacher for twenty
years before becoming a project officer of the SCDC National Writing Project (1986-89) and
then worked at Homerton College, Cambridge and the University of Cambridge Faculty
of Education where her research interests were children’s production of multimodal texts
and gender, language and literacy. She has also written and edited many books about
language, literacy and children’s literature and was co-author of Teaching Grammar
Effectively in Primary Schools.
Rebecca Kennedy is an independent consultant specialising in English. She has a range of
experience teaching and supporting primary schools and working alongside local authorities
and as an external moderator. Rebecca works as an associate consultant with the Centre
for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), training and writing for the Power of Reading
project. Her professional interests are children's reading and writing, multimodality and
children's literature. She has contributed to several United Kingdom Literacy Association
publications and is on the editorial board of English 4-11.
David Reedy is General Secretary of the United Kingdom Literacy Association and
Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT). Until 2014 he was Principal
Adviser for primary schools in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. David is
also a former Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London. His most
recent publications include Teaching Grammar Effectively in Primary Schools (2014,
UKLA) with Eve Bearne, Guiding Reading – A Handbook for Teaching Guided Reading
at KS2 (Institute of Education, with Angela Hobsbaum and Nikki Gamble) and Developing
Writing for Different Purposes - Teaching About Genre in the Early Years (Paul Chapman
with Jeni Riley).
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Noelle Hunt, language support teacher, Tudor Primary School,
Hemel Hempstead and to the following schools:
Beam County Primary School, Dagenham.
St Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Primary School, Walsall.
Tiverton Academy, Selly Oak, Birmingham.
Westlands First School, Droitwich, Worcestershire.
Design by [email protected]
ISBN
ISBN EPUB
ISBN AER
ISBN ONL
978 1910543 54 2
978 1910543 55 9
978 1910543 56 6
978 1910543 57 3
ISSN
ISSN
2042-2229 (print)
2050-9049 (online)
Teaching Grammar Effectively at Key Stage 1
1
Contents
Introduction
4
Why teach grammar at Key Stage 1?
4
Teaching grammar for meaning
4
Research on grammar
5
Talking about grammar
5
Punctuation matters
5
Implicit knowledge about language
6
Children’s implicit knowledge about language
6
Testing children’s knowledge about grammar
8
The stucture of these materials
8
Section One Words
10
Terminology check Nouns and noun phrases
10
Terminology check Verbs
11
Case study year 1
Nouns and verbs
11
Quick and Easy
Proper nouns (whole class/small group work year 1)
13
Terminology check Determiners
14
Quick and Easy
14
Determiners (small group work year 2)
Terminology check Word families
15
Quick and Easy
15
Word families (whole class/small group year 1/2)
Terminology check Prefixes
16
Terminology check Suffixes
16
Quick and Easy
Prefixes to verbs (whole class year 1)
17
Vignette year 2
Verb tenses: present and past (suffixes to verbs)
17
Terminology check Adjectives
20
Quick and Easy
20
Adjectives (whole class/ independent work year 1)
Terminology check Prepositions
21
Vignette year 1
22
Prepositions
Terminology check Adverbs and adverbials
23
Quick and Easy
24
Verbs and adverbs (whole class year 1)
Terminology check Pronouns
25
Vignette year 1
26
Pronouns
Section Two Words into sentences
29
Terminology check Clauses and simple sentences
29
Case study year 2
30
The expanded noun phrase
Terminology check Questions, exclamations, statements and commands
32
Case study year 1
32
Questions, exclamations and statements
continues over
Contents
2
Test Alert
Questions and Exclamations
34
Quick and Easy
Commands (whole class year 1/2)
35
Terminology check Subject and object
35
Vignette year 1
35
Subject and object
Terminology check Simple, compound and complex sentences
38
Terminology check Conjunctions
38
Case study year 2
38
Compound sentences using co-ordinating conjunctions
Terminology check Subordination
41
Case study year 2
41
Subordination
Section Three Punctuation
45
Quick and Easy
Capital letters for proper nouns (whole class year 1)
45
Quick and Easy
Serial commas/commas in lists (whole class year 2)
45
Terminology check Apostrophes
46
Quick and Easy
Apostrophes of omission (whole class/small group year 2)
47
Quick and Easy
Apostrophes of possession (whole class/small group year 2)
49
Quick and Easy
Speech punctuation (whole class/small group year 2)
50
Section Four Text
52
Terminology check Progressive verbs
52
Quick and Easy
Present progressive and past progressive verbs
(whole class/small group years 1/2)
52
Terminology check Paragraphs
53
Case study year 2
54
Paragraphs
Terminology check Standard English
56
Case study year 2
57
Standard English and verb tenses
Terminology check Cohesion
60
Case study year 2
Cohesion
61
Case study year 3
Consolidating paragraphing and cohesion
63
The KS1 Spelling, grammar and punctuation test
68
References
69
Children’s books
69
Photocopiable resources
71
Index
83
Contents
3
List of Figures
Figure 1 Chloe’s story
Figure 2 Badou’s favourite toy
Figure 3 Zubaydah’s story using paragraphs
Figures 4 - 9 Lila and the Secret of Rain retold by Ahmed, Daanish, Darragh, Deja, Henna and Sadiq
Figure 10 Mason’s Goldilocks story
Figure 11 Modelling using the story mountain
Figure 12 Abubakr and David’s notes about elephants
Figure 13 Abubakr’s early report about elephants
Figure 14 Alex’s Green turtles fact sheet
Figure 15 Alper’s Green turtles fact sheet
Teaching
at key stage
1
Introduction
4
Introduction
Why teach grammar at key stage 1?
Or, why teach young children about the use of language? The answer is the same for any age group: when
you know how language works, you have choices about how best to get your message across. Teaching
explicitly about aspects of grammar helps young writers to make those choices effectively: they can say
what they want to say and write what they want to write. This book emphasises the importance of teaching
about grammar, but first it’s worth making clear just what grammar is. When teachers have been asked:
‘What do you think when you hear the word ‘grammar’?’ some see it as about spoken English and particularly
about speaking ‘correctly’:
My grammar isn’t very good – I’ve got a local accent.
Or they may reflect a lack of confidence:
Scary - I don’t know what an adverbial is.
Or they may know something about grammar:
It’s about writing in proper sentences.
When asked about being taught grammar at school, replies vary from:
I didn’t do grammar at school so I’m clueless about it.
to:
We had a grammar lesson every week and I never understood a word of it.
In reply to the question: ‘How did you learn about grammar?’ teachers often say something like:
I didn’t understand anything about grammar until I learned Spanish.
and:
I learned most about grammar by teaching it.
Of course there will be teachers who have more positive views about grammar because they were well taught
in their own schools, but often there is a sense of anxiety and insecurity when hearing the word ‘grammar’.
Teaching grammar for meaning
Grammar is the study of how we make sense in speaking, reading or writing so that we can understand
people who use the same language as we do. It’s no more mysterious than that. The trouble is that often
grammar is taught by doing exercises out of all context of meaning, for example, naming parts of speech:
noun, verb etc. This can in itself be misleading since the same word can be referred to as either depending
on how it’s used. Take the word ‘mean’ for example. In the sentence: The old woman was mean. ‘mean’
is an adjective – it tells us something about the old woman. But in the sentence: I didn’t mean that. ‘mean’
is a verb. So understanding grammar is more than a matter of just learning to name parts of speech; it’s a
matter of understanding how language works so that we can say (or write) exactly what we want to say as
effectively as possible.
Before starting to teach grammar, it is worth reflecting on how you were taught grammar, how successful
it was and how confident you feel when you see lists of grammatical terms. If you feel confident, then it
suggests that you were taught first about how language works and then given the grammatical terms to
describe language features. You used the grammar first, to make meaning, then used the grammatical
terminology. That kind of knowledge and experience helps you to make sense of language and shape
language to say what you want to say. If you feel a tingle of fear when you hear particular terminology, then
it suggests that you were only taught the names of grammatical parts, rather than how they work to create
meaning – or you weren’t explicitly taught grammar. The aim of this book is to help make grammar a useful
Introduction
and supportive way for children to get better at expressing ideas, through teaching in the context of meaning,
not as a matter of naming things out of context.
Research on grammar
Two significant large-scale studies (Hillocks, 1986; Andrews et al., 2006) found no evidence that formal
teaching of grammar out of context has any beneficial effect on either reading or writing. In contrast, a
large-scale study by Myhill et al. (2012) in secondary schools found significant positive effects for teaching
grammar in the context of teaching about writing. The key teaching principles in the Myhill et al. study
are that grammatical terminology (or metalanguage) is best explained through real examples in texts;
language features are explored in the context of how their use can enhance writing; discussion is essential
to encourage critical conversations about language and its effects; ‘creative imitation’ offers model patterns
for pupils to play with and then use in their own writing and playing with language and taking risks are
actively encouraged to support pupils in making choices about their own writing. When it comes to teaching,
it’s easier to help children be more reflective readers and writers if teachers and pupils have a shared language
to talk about how language works.
Talking about grammar
Being able to use grammatical terminology allows for clearer and more precise talk about grammar and
discussion of its function and effects. For example, in key stage 1, starting with picturebooks, a focus on
verbs might start with a book where a child is walking down the road. In role-play children might be asked
to think about different ways the child might be going down the road: running, sprinting, trudging, gliding,
scooting, skipping, dawdling... Children enact these different verbs and discuss how they change the
movement as well as suggesting the mood of the character. These insights can then be used to build
vocabulary and offer choices for them to use in their own writing whilst developing their grammatical
understanding of the function of verbs – that they are more than simply ‘doing words’. Many verbs are
‘action’ verbs but there are also stative verbs, such as think, believe, hope, which involve no action (see
page 11). Once children have got to grips with verbs they can think about how adverbs and adverbials
modify verbs – that is, add information about how, when, where or how often the verb is carried out. For
instance, someone might trudge slowly, unwillingly, sadly, with a happy smile. Children may not immediately
remember the grammatical terms, but they are likely to remember the way the language changes to suggest
different effects.
Punctuation matters
Punctuation is rather like musical notation - it just tells the reader how to read the words on the page:
when to pause, when to make your voice rise to indicate a question, when to be emphatic. Punctuation
shows us the meaning in a piece of writing and it really matters. The following poem by Willard R. Espy
gets the message across:
PRIVATE? NO!
Punctuation makes a difference.
Private
No swimming
Allowed
does not mean the same as
Private?
No. Swimming
Allowed.
5
Introduction
6
Although there are some regularities, like so many aspects of language these rules are not always hard and
fast. Where you put punctuation depends on what you want to say, so looking carefully at where published
writers have used punctuation helps young writers to see how they can vary punctuation to create the effect
they want in their writing.
Implicit knowledge about language
We all know a lot about grammar. By the age of five many children can speak in sentences when necessary,
and adults certainly can. This is all implicit knowledge.
What do we know implicitly about language? Try filling in the gaps here with one word for each space (there
are no correct answers):
I ran to the ____ and tripped over a ____. It was ____. Unhappily, I ____ . What could I ____ now?
In the first sentence, you might have chosen words like ‘corner’, ‘clearing’ or ‘boat’ and ‘paving stone’,
‘root’ or ‘rope’. These are nouns. No other kind of word would fit. It just wouldn’t sound right if you put
‘pretty’ or ‘talked’ in either of those gaps. In the second sentence you may have put the adjective ‘painful’.
It wouldn’t have made sense if you had put ‘dog’ or ‘car’ there (try it). In the third sentence, you wouldn’t
have put the adjective ‘green’. ‘Unhappily, I green.’ just doesn’t make sense, but adding a verb such as
‘cried’ or ‘whimpered’ would. And similarly, in the final space you wouldn’t put a noun or an adjective but
another verb like ‘do’ or ‘say’.
Being able to fill in the gaps in these sentences shows your implicit knowledge of how language works
and the choices you can make. It’s worth remembering that children will have implicit knowledge too.
Knowledge about language, or grammar, means bringing what is under the surface – implicit – out into the
open and making it explicit. And having a language to talk about grammar helps in this process of explicitly
teaching about grammatical features. The process of explicit teaching includes revisiting and consolidating
language learning throughout schooling. Many teachers are familiar with the phenomenon of having ‘taught’
a point of grammar and done worksheets (which the children all got right) then finding that the children
haven’t transferred their knowledge. This is why it is crucial to teach for meaning and for children to
understand the control that grammatical knowledge gives a reader/writer.
Children’s implicit knowledge about language
In year 2 of Tiverton Academy, Birmingham, Tammy Round planned a teaching sequence for English
linked to the curriculum theme of superheroes. After extensive reading and discussion, and a workshop
where the children made their own sock puppet superheroes, Chloe wrote this story as an independent
writing challenge.
This is an engaging story, showing a mature emotional sense and an assured storyteller’s voice. But what
does Chloe know implicitly about grammar in order to be able to write like this? What could be said to her
about her writing? What can she already do and what does she need to improve? Some of her knowledge
is summarised below with indications of the year of the national curriculum for English that these features
are expected:
In terms of word knowledge, she has good command of writerly language: ‘fell into a deep, deep, dark hole’;
‘she tried her new powers’; ‘at the time’; ‘my baby girl has turned into a woman’ and her vocabulary is
adventurous: ‘aware of heights’; ‘had memories of when she was a baby’. She also uses compound words
like ‘supergirl’ (year 1), stative verbs like ‘felt’ and the progressive verb forms: ‘was walking’; ‘was falling’
(year 2).
Her sentence knowledge shows that she understands how to vary the length of sentences for effect: ‘When
she was walking she fell into a deep, deep, dark hole.’; ‘She jumped’. She writes complex sentences, using
subordination (year 2) and adverbials: ‘One sunny day… .’ ‘When she was walking… .’ (years 3/4)
Introduction
7
One sunny day, a girl named Rosey was walking to school. When she was walking she felt different and
she fell into a deep, deep, dark hole. When she was falling she banged her head on the side and magic
rats bit her. When she woke up she shred (tried) to reach up high but it dident work. She jumped. When
she jumped she flyed high into the sky. She was aware of hights pepole called her Supergirl. She tryed
her new powers. She had eye Blast she could pick up a car she was happy and strong but at the time
she missed her mates from scoohl. then she saw they were in troubul. “help help,” said the girls Her mom
looked out the window and said “my baby girl has tunerened (turned) into a women” one tear went
down her face and had memeres of her when she was a baby.
Above (illustration and text) Figure 1 Chloe’s story
Although she doesn’t always mark the sentence boundaries, this is all written in complete sentences (year 2).
She correctly uses these punctuation marks most of the time: capital letters, full stops (year 1), commas
to separate items: ‘deep, deep, dark’ (year 2), and is beginning to use, and mark, direct speech (year 3).
The text is organised clearly, with a beginning, several events and a reflective ending. She uses the past
tense consistently and is in a transitional stage where she knows from her year 1 experience that regular
verbs form their past tense with ‘-ed’ so she generalises this pattern to verbs which are, in fact irregular:
‘flyed’. It will not be long before she learns that some verbs form their past tense differently.
Where did Chloe get this knowledge from? This writing is not formulaic, simply aping the models she has
been given. Chloe’s teacher has planned for her class to have rich reading experiences linked to specific
language goals, reading and investigating a range of texts. These have been accompanied by explicit teaching
about the chosen language feature(s). All their work is based on a good deal of discussion and experimentation – trying out ideas in their own writing so that the children can make controlled writing choices
when it comes to writing independently (see page 9 REDM process). Research indicates that this kind of
experience is the best way for children to get to grips with grammar and language use. At the moment,
Chloe is automatically using a range of language features which she has chosen in order to make an effect
Introduction
8
on her readers. She can also talk about her writing using appropriate terminology. The process of moving
from reading to writing via discussion and giving children opportunities to try out their own ideas is a
much more effective process than taking the class through a series of ‘naming’ parts of language out of
context and completing decontextualised exercises.
Testing children’s knowledge of grammar
From 2016, seven year olds in England will be tested on their knowledge about grammar, punctuation and
vocabulary as well as spelling. The tests are structured so that they can be easily marked, so many questions
require simply identifying particular grammatical features. For example:
1. Tick the correct word to complete the sentence below.
I hope _______ we will play musical chairs at the party.
Tick one.
when
if
that
because
2. What type of word is underlined in the sentence below?
Poppy held the baby rabbit gently in her arms.
Tick one.
an adjective
an adverb
a noun
a verb
(1)
In order to perform well in the test, children need to be familiar with the terminology and able to apply
their understanding of grammatical terms in an unfamiliar and artificial context. But even if they are successful
at this, it tells us nothing about their writing ability or their ability to reflect on how authors make grammatical
choices for effects. Although this book is not designed to help children practise for these kinds of test, it
does set out to support children’s developing knowledge and understanding of grammar in context and
enhance their ability to tackle tests like these successfully.
The structure of these materials
These materials cover the grammatical and punctuation features listed as word, sentence, text and punctuation
in the national curriculum programmes of study and statutory appendices.
The chart below shows the terminology the children should be introduced to in each year, according to
the national curriculum for English (2014). Year 3 has been included because many children, like Chloe,
are already using some of the language and text features when they are still in key stage 1.
Some of the terminology related to spelling, for example, prefix and suffix, consonant and vowel, are
included but much of the spelling in years 1-3 of the national curriculum is not dealt with in this book, for
two reasons: i) there is already a mass of good guidance about spelling and ii) to cover all the spelling appendix
in the curriculum would require another whole book!
Introduction
There are also suggestions for teaching language features not listed in the programmes of study – pronouns,
for example, and progressive verb forms. These are included because the teachers who have contributed
to this book have found it useful to teach them in order to help children improve their writing.
Year
Terminology
1
Letter, capital letter, word, singular, plural, sentence, punctuation, full stop,
question mark, exclamation mark
2
Noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix,
adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma
3
Preposition, conjunction, word family, prefix, clause, subordinate clause, direct speech,
consonant, consonant letter, vowel, vowel letter, inverted commas (or ‘speech marks’)
Learning about language is a cumulative process, so while case study examples and vignettes based on
practice are attached to specific year groups, the rest of the material can be used with any year as appropriate.
Many aspects will need to be revisited as children grow more experienced with texts, as they become more
analytical about what they read and as they learn to refine the way they write. For this reason, the material
does not strictly follow the sequence in the chart above.
However, there is a common process about all of the material and an underlying view about children
being actively involved in investigating language in use. All the case studies, vignettes and ‘Quick and
Easy’ examples begin with reading and investigation, move through discussion of the specific language
feature and experimenting with it in use, and end in practising its use by making informed and controlled
choices in writing.
The process of teaching grammar in context follows REDM sequence:
G
G
G
G
Reading and investigation
Explicit teaching
Discussion and experimentation
Making controlled writing choices
Throughout the material there are also handy terminology checks and there is a special section about
tackling the year 2 test with suggestions for games to confirm learning specific items of grammar.
The final section contains photocopiable resources.
Notes
1. These examples are taken from the sample key stage 1 papers for English, spelling and punctuation,
taken from:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2016-key-stage-1-english-grammar-punctuationand-spelling-test-sample-questions-mark-scheme-and-commentary Accessed 11th December, 2015.
9