I’ve been teaching apostrophes to show possession to a low-attainment Year 4 class. Have seen lots of ‘flipcharts’ online, however the language was not accessible to my lower-level learners. Consequently, I found it helpful to create a slightly more simplified flowchart to help scaffold using apostrophes for all learners in my class. Pupils can access these from my English display now any time they are unsure of apostrophes. I found it helpful to teach the word ‘possessor’ to them to complement the flow-chart.

When preparing my Y4 class for an extended write, I decided I needed to focus on the statutory spellings more. As it was a descriptive piece (in which we are also including adverbials, conjunctions, noun phrases etc) I thought it would be useful for them to include statutory spellings into these devices where possible. I was surprised to see that I could not find a ‘word class mat’ for these words, so thought that I would quickly create one. It has come in surprisingly helpful and the children enjoy hitting ‘two birds with one stone’ when including their spellings into their writing.