Year 5 SPAG

Workshop

January 2016

“Grammar to a writer is to

a mountaineer a good pair

of hiking boots or, to a deep-

sea diver, an oxygen tank.”

Aim

To help you understand how we teach SPAG at

Knaphill.

To help you understand how we are preparing the

children for SATS.

To help you understand how you can support your

child at home.

• Emphasis on presentation skills and in particular handwriting –

Penpals/Handwriting lessons

• Displays are enriched with children’s work to motivate children to

produce quality work.

• Regular extended writing opportunities across the curriculum

including in Science and Topic.

• New writing ‘I can statements’ are now in Topic books as well as

Literacy books. These are heavily grammar based now.

• Grammar and Spelling Starters at the start of our Literacy lessons

• Spelling rules and patterns are taught every week using a new

scheme of work (Big Spellings).

• Every half term children complete a practice SPAG test (Rising Stars).

How are we teaching it?

Grammar and Punctuation:

• Converting nouns or adjectives into verbs using suffixes

• Verb prefixes

• Relative clauses/relative pronouns

• Modal verbs

• Adverbs

• Paragraphs

• Adverbials

• Brackets, dashes and commas

• Determiners

• Parenthesis (brackets)

New Curriculum Expectations – Year 5

• Grammar and Punctuation:

• Informal and formal speech and writing

• Passive voice/active voice

• Expanded noun phrases

• Adverbials

• Ellipsis

• Layout devices (sub-headings, columns, bullet points)

• Semi-colon, colon bullet points and dashes

• Hyphens

• Synonyms and antonyms

New Curriculum Expectations – Year 6

I can Statements

Warm Up Activity

How many different sentence openers can you think

of to start this sentence?

Thomas swam towards the boat.

Have you tried…?

Simple Sentences

The big dog was barking.

Compound sentences

The boys walked down the road and their parents waved from the house.

Complex Sentences

A complex sentence contains one main

clause that can make sense on its own,

and one or more minor (subordinate)

clauses that are linked to it.

When I arrived, the big dog was barking.

Main Clause: Alice entered the room.

Subordinate Clauses:

who was shaking with fear

although she was scared

feeling full of confidence

Write the above sentence using subordinate clauses

in as many different ways as you can. You can split

up Alice and entered the room.

Relative Clauses

Subordinate clauses can begin with a relative

pronoun (who, whose, which, that) and so are

called relative clauses.

For example:

Alice, who was shaking with fear, entered the room.

SPAG Test End of KS2

• Paper 1: Pupils will have 45 minutes to

complete the test, answering the questions

in the test paper

• Paper 2: Pupils will have approximately 15

minutes to complete the spelling test (not

strictly timed), by writing the 20 missing

words in the answer booklet.

KS2 SPAG Results are reported

by:

A raw score (number of marks

awarded).

A scaled score (score is based on

National Average).

Confirmation of whether or not they

attained the National Standard.

Why not have a go at some of

the questions in the test?

What are your thoughts?

How can you help your child at

home?

Practise spellings with them at home.

Support them with Literacy based homework and

encourage them to use correct grammar (the ‘I

can’ statements are on the website to help).

Remind them to use Standard English when they

write.

When reading at home, point out grammar and

punctuation used.