The introductory phases of KS2 sentence building programs entails either modeled or shared guided reading. During this time, students have the opportunity to hear the spoken language pattern and observe the use of commas and punctuation in sentences. Examples of sentence building themes for discussion may include reading an example where colons or semi-colons, reading texts that emphasize how varied sentence structure and imagery words impact a story's atmosphere and modeling connective sentences in front of children.
After the introductory phase, students should break into groups. Sentence building group assignments may include reading, writing or listening/speaking activities. Reading activities during this phase might include pairing students to read excerpts from fantasy texts together and then identify and highlight features that reveal the setting of the passage. One way of practicing writing is by having children work with other students in a group to write out instructions that they would give to a new student looking for the principal's office. For activities with greater focus on listening and speaking, assign poetry readings to groups or have students describe visual images together using descriptive language and varying sentences.
Following group work, teachers should assign students sentence activities to work on independently. Independent work focuses on the same ability areas as group work (reading, writing, listening/speaking). Independent activities might include having students review previously read text and highlight powerful verbs, similes or metaphors. Alternatively, teachers may ask students to change the meaning of sentences by replacing adverbs used in the texts with another adverb. For practice with connectives, teachers can ask students to replace numbers in instructive texts with connectives such as first, then, secondly, lastly, finally.
For the last part of each sentence building lesson, teachers should spend about 10 minutes recapitulating lesson objectives with students. During lesson closure, it is important that teachers effectively summarize the material students have learned and allow children time to reflect. At the end of KS2, students should have developed their ability to communicate in a more complex, organized manner. Additionally, students should be able to identify varying speech patterns in sentence structure and understand how to follow grammatical conventions. Overall, KS2 learning should enable the student to develop skills to read, write, and speak/understand in coherent, constructive English