Grammar

At the beginning of each year, children spend time learning the ‘Place Value of Punctuation and Grammar’ from Grammarsaurus. It is an approach to teaching writing that treats grammar and punctuation as the fundamental building blocks of writing—much like place value serves as the foundation for maths. The program is designed to be taught at the very beginning of each academic year to help students master basic sentence structures, parts of speech, and mechanics before moving on to creative writing tasks.

Grammar is then taught through the genre-specific features. For example, writing command sentences would be taught through instructional writing with explicit links being made with the use of imperative verbs. Over the course of the year, once a year-specific grammar feature has been taught, it is then expected to be used in subsequent pieces of writing (where appropriate for that genre). Therefore, grammar is taught staggered across the year to avoid cognitive overload and recall and repetitive opportunities are used in subsequent pieces of writing.