In England, the national curriculum for spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG) is outlined in the English Programmes of Study, which provides guidance for Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 5-11). Here’s what you need to know!
1. **Spelling**:
– Learning common spelling patterns and rules.
– Understanding and applying spelling rules.
– Learning to spell a variety of words, including words with silent letters, homophones, and homonyms.
2. **Punctuation**:
– Understanding and using capital letters, full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, commas, apostrophes, colons, semicolons, and inverted commas (quotation marks).
– Understanding how punctuation affects meaning and clarity in writing.
3. **Grammar**:
– Understanding parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions).
– Understanding sentence structure (e.g., subject-verb agreement, word order).
– Learning about clauses (main clauses and subordinate clauses) and phrases.
– Understanding and using different sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory).
– Learning about tense and verb conjugation.
– Understanding and using direct and indirect speech.
These topics are taught progressively throughout Key Stages 1 and 2, with increasing complexity and depth as students advance through the curriculum. Teachers often use a variety of resources, including textbooks, worksheets, interactive activities, and educational software, to support students’ learning in SPaG.
