KS1 English & Literacy
Building Confident Writers Through Sentence Stretching
Challenge. Many pupils were writing single-clause sentences with limited vocabulary and little detail, and lacked the confidence to extend their ideas.
Approach. I explicitly taught sentence stretching using Who, What, Where, When, Why and How prompts and the use of adjectives. I modelled writing in every lesson, built word banks and sentence stems, and gave immediate verbal feedback with time to edit.
Impact. Five of the nine targeted pupils were writing expanded sentences independently by the end of the intervention. Average sentence length grew from one simple idea to two or three detailed ideas, with pupils using adjectives and conjunctions such as “and” and “because” more confidently.
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