Are you a teacher looking for effective ways to help your students master sentence construction and punctuation? Do you hear yourself thinking, “They don’t know what a sentence is!” or “They don’t know what end punctuation is!”? The Writing For Pleasure Centre offers a solution designed specifically for young writers of all needs and abilities.
Sentence-Building Mini-Projects, developed by experienced writer-teachers Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson, are more than just exercises – they are a playful, purposeful, and powerful way for you and your pupils to explore writing. Grounded in extensive research and classroom practice, this programme provides direct instruction at the sentence-level through structured yet engaging projects.
The core of the programme involves short book-making projects. These projects offer a unique advantage by allowing children to focus on crafting manageable pieces of text within the broader process of creating real writing. They are not rote exercises or worksheets. Instead, they closely mirror real writing by asking students to revise and enhance sentences they have composed themselves. The projects are also infinitely repeatable, providing practice whenever needed.
What makes these projects so effective?
- Functional understanding: Children learn the function of different pieces of punctuation and sentence types, rather than just memorising terms. For example, they learn how end punctuation signals the end of a thought and how a sentence should be read, or how coordinating conjunctions let them add more information.
- Practical application: The projects promote a better understanding of capitalisation and punctuation through practical application, making grammar instruction far more meaningful.
- Experimentation and discovery: Each project invites children to experiment, take risks, and discover new ways of shaping their ideas.
- Incremental skill building: Projects are sequenced carefully, helping young writers build their sentence-level skills incrementally, moving from simple sentences towards a full repertoire of understanding. This means there are projects suitable for various age ranges, from the EYFS through to Year 6.
- Focus on meaning and audience: Students are helped to consider how sentence structure impacts their readers and gain a greater appreciation for constructing unique writing styles. They learn to make each word count towards the meaning they wish to convey.
- Drawing integration: Drawing is an important part of the process. By developing content through pictures, the projects reduce cognitive load, allowing young writers, especially those with difficulties, to focus on expression. Drawing also helps children see how their sentence-level decisions impact the meaning of their illustrations, making grammatical patterns visible and instruction more useful and exciting.
- Building confidence and fluency: As young writers gain control over sentence construction and punctuation, they gain confidence and begin to write with greater originality and style. This also enhances their reading fluency and comprehension by familiarising them with complex sentence patterns.
- Supports revision skills: The projects help children transform their sentences for meaning, not just make superficial changes.
The mini-projects cover a wide range of sentence-level concepts, including:
- Understanding what a sentence is
- Using end punctuation
- Adding information with coordinating conjunctions
- Using adjectives and adverbs
- Understanding apostrophes for possession
- Using commas and semi-colons for lists
- Applying capital letters
- Using prepositional phrases
- Adding extra information with subordinating conjunctions
- Choosing precise nouns and verbs
- Punctuating direct speech with speech marks and speaker tags
- Understanding the usefulness of pronouns
- Exploring modal verbs
- Adding ‘bonus’ information with relative clauses and parenthesis
- Understanding the passive voice
- Using the subjunctive mood
- Preventing ambiguity with hyphens
- Connecting related sentences with semi-colons
- Using colons for ‘drumrolls’ and explanations
- Constructing complex multi-clause sentences
- Understanding tense
- Writing in different perspectives (1st, 2nd, 3rd person)
By integrating these projects into your teaching, you can provide your students with the tools and understanding they need to become more proficient, confident, and expressive writers. Each project includes planning guidance, exemplar texts, and subject knowledge to help you seamlessly integrate sentence-level teaching into your existing curriculum.
Explore The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Building Mini-Projects and help your students write happily and fluently!
Individual license – £10.95
School/Institution license – £54.75
or FREE for members