Pupil Version of Exciting Sentences App by Alan Peat

I was honoured to be asked by Alan to contribute to a pupil version of his Exciting Sentences App. I'd had an idea about grouping his sentence types into writing genres as I thought this would be useful for teachers' planning. As teachers we often plan our literacy in terms of a specific writing genre. Therefore having a resource which indicated which sentence types would be appropriate to that genre seems like a good idea. Thankfully, Alan agreed.

The end result is a section on he new app (Due for release in July) that allows pupils and/or teachers to identify which sentence types they need for different writing genres. The narrative genres are sub-divided e.g. myths, fairytales, adventure stories. There are also sentence types suggestions for all non-fiction writing genres. A word of warning, though. This resource is not intended to be used as a checklist as this could interrupt the flow of the writing. Alan is very clear that this is not how he wants his sentence types to be used. Instead, I envisage that my grouping of sentence types will be used as more of a menu, where children select those sentence types that will have the greatest effect.

Hopefully teachers and pupils will find this useful. Having trialled this idea in the school where I teach, it was met with a very positive response and the children found the examples very useful. Reluctant writers have found the 'menu' idea especially helpful as it helps them get over the 'I don't know what to write' hurdle.