For many teachers, the prospect of teaching writing can feel daunting. Research indicates that many of us feel ill-prepared to teach writing, often replicating the ineffective methods we experienced ourselves as children. This challenge extends specifically to teaching about sentences, leaving many unsure where to begin. Yet, effective sentence construction is vital for clear and meaningful written expression. Struggles with sentence construction can significantly impact children’s writing, consuming their working memory, hindering fluency, and affecting clarity and coherence.
Recognising this widespread issue, The Writing For Pleasure Centre was founded as a think tank and action research community dedicated to helping all young people become passionate and successful writers. Through extensive research, including meta-analyses and case studies, we have developed a pedagogy based on what the science and research evidence indicates is the most effective practice. This approach, known as The Writing For Pleasure approach, can be considered a synonym for world-class writing teaching.
A cornerstone of this approach is sentence-level instruction. Teaching at the sentence level is essential because it supports core writing processes like planning, drafting, and revising, and helps free up working memory for higher-level concerns like purpose and audience. Limited sentence skills can hinder children’s writing fluency, making it difficult for children to translate ideas into text quickly and often leading to writing that is judged negatively (see our Writing Map for more details).
To address these challenges, we offer our Sentence-Level Curriculum. This comprehensive curriculum draws on our extensive research base. It provides teachers with the confidence and tools needed to teach about sentences in a way that helps children write their most successful and meaningful pieces.
The curriculum organises sentence-level instruction into three categories reflecting what children are trying to achieve in their writing:
- Focused sentences: Lessons that help children concentrate on the most important parts of their writing – nouns and verbs – forming the basis of well-focused sentences.
- Balanced sentences: Instruction to help children make connections between their thoughts and ideas, sharing reasoning, providing contrasts, establishing conditions, and discussing alternatives.
- Developed sentences: Lessons focused on pushing the reader’s thinking, understanding, and imaginings, elaborating on meaning using artistic flair, rhetorical techniques and poetic devices.
Our Sentence-Level Curriculum incorporates writing-study lessons, which involve sharing powerful ‘how to’ knowledge and inviting children to apply it during writing time. These mini-lessons are short, explicit, and direct, teaching one concept before inviting application. The approach recommends a consistent routine of mini-lesson, writing time, and class sharing.
The other key component of the curriculum is the use of sentence-building mini-projects. These are not rote exercises but short, playful and purposeful ways for children to explore writing by experimenting, taking risks, and discovering new ways of shaping ideas. The projects are designed to build children’s skills quickly but incrementally, starting with simple sentences and progressing towards a full repertoire of understanding.
These short projects are based on three evidence-informed principles:
- Teaching students what sentences are and expanding their awareness of syntactic possibilities.
- Focusing on sentence formation and revision to gradually reduce cognitive load.
- Improving children’s writing fluency.
The projects encourage children to see the function of different punctuation and sentence types and how manipulating syntax helps them discover different ways of expressing ideas. They allow children to focus on crafting small, manageable pieces of text within the broader process of ‘making’ real writing.
Specific mini-projects cover a range of sentence and grammar concepts suitable for different age ranges, from the EYFS to Year 6 (3-11 year olds). For example:
- Understanding what a sentence is
- Using end punctuation (full stops, question marks, exclamation marks)
- Connecting ideas with coordinating conjunctions
- Adding detail with adjectives and expanded noun phrases
- Making verbs more precise with adverbs
- Using pronouns to avoid repetition
- Crafting complex sentences with subordinating conjunctions
- Using the passive voice
- Understanding the subjunctive mood
- Adding extra information with parenthesis
- Connecting related sentences with semicolons
- Introducing explanations or lists with colons
Our sentence curriculum emphasises the use of mentor texts to show children what can be done with sentences and how they can apply these techniques in their own writing. Teachers are encouraged to model techniques from their own writing and from other published examples. The projects also use drawing to help children – especially those who struggle most – focus on expressing their ideas clearly and to visualise how different sentence constructions affect the style and meaning of what they want to say.
Ultimately, The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Curriculum is designed to help children gain control over sentence construction and punctuation, leading to increased confidence and the ability to write with greater originality and style. By focusing on the function of sentence elements and engaging children in playful experimentation and thoughtful revision, this curriculum lays the foundation for more fluent, expressive, and successful writing.