• Give the child good models of language, i.e. use complete concise sentences.
• Expand the child’s utterance, e.g. if the child says “kicking the ball”, expand with “Yes, the man is kicking the ball”.
• If the child produces an error, repeat the child’s utterance modelling the correct word or grammatical structure. E.g. if the child says “the dentist looked at all my tooths”, respond with “he looked at all your teeth, did he?”, emphasising the key word.
• Give children ‘thinking time’. All children benefit from being given time to plan and organise what they want to say.

Building Sentences

• Link lots of words together and may use joining words such as ‘and’.
• Ask lots of questions e.g. What? Where? Why?
• Use the grammatical words (e.g. is, was, has, the, a) i.e. “the man is eating” instead of “man eating”.
• Increased use of past tense and 3rd person singular e.g. he drinks, she eats, the cat jumped. Children will still over generalise irregular verb endings at this age e.g. “throwed” (instead of “threw”).
• Use pronouns his/hers, they/theirs, him/her, ours, himself/herself/yourself/ourselves.

Activity sheet

Building Sentences

• Use well formed sentences with more details.
• Use some irregular past tense e.g. “I drank all my milk”, “She took my teddy” but may still make some errors.
• Start to use words: ‘if’, ‘because’, ‘so’, ‘could’.
• Show that they can use language to reason and persuade e.g. “Can I go outside because it’s stopped raining?”

Activity sheet

Building Sentences

• Ask lots of questions to find out specific information including ‘how’ and ‘why’ e.g. “How do we know burglars can’t get in?”
• Use an imaginative range of descriptive words in sentences e.g. “Suddenly, he saw a huge hairy creature”
• Use more complicated grammar and different ways to join phrases to help explain or justify an event e.g. “It was scary because even the man with the dog looked worried, so we decided to get out of there”

Activity sheet

Building Sentences

• Use a wide range of regular and unusual word endings, with few errors being made e.g. Fought, fell, brought, geese, fish.
• Use long and complex sentence structures and more complex joining words to make language flow e.g. ‘Meanwhile’, ‘therefore’ or ‘yet’.
• Use complex grammar and sentences effectively to communicate in different ways to clarify, summarise, explain choices and plan.
• Uses language to reason and persuade.
• Explain some rules of grammar and know when a sentence is not grammatically correct.
• Sentences average about 7-10 words –longer in stories than in conversation.

Activity sheet

Jumbled Sentences activity

Building Sentences

• Uses a range of complex connectives in speech and writing e.g. ‘although’, ‘as well as’.
• Average length of spoken sentences 7-11+ words.

Activity sheet

Building Sentences Secondary Self-help Strategies

Building Sentences

• Uses a wider range of complex connectives in speech and writing e.g. even though, however, provided that, similarly.
• Average length of spoken sentences 7-13+ words.

Activity sheet

Building Sentences Secondary Self-help Strategies