What is BISCUIT PLEASE?
BISCUIT PLEASE is a structured, layered approach to teaching children to use a wide variety of sentence structures in their writing. By using a variety of sentence structures, children's writing flows more and can be adapted more easily for different styles of writing. We have constructed a layered approach which involves the children being taught a small number of new sentence types in each year. The idea is that if they use these sentence types frequently, then they will build up a range from which they can be more selective when they reach the top of the school. The document that you see here is the structure of the system which identified which sentence structures the children will be taught in each year group. Naturally, they will be some adjustments made for children who find this easier or more challnging.
Year 2
In Year 2, children learn to add additional information at the start of the sentence. This can be through adverbial starters or prepositions (many of which are also adverbial starters). We introduce the comma to them in these situations which then enhances their use of punctuation too. In Year 2, children complete booklet 1. This gives them practice in their use of the new sentence types.
Year 3
In Year 3, the children learn to build on the sentence types introduced in Year 2 and begin to add figurative language through the use of similes.
Year 4 and 5
In Years 4 and 5, the children build on previous learning but also begin to add further information in different places in the sentences. The idea is that the children have been exposed to all of the sentence types by the end of year 5 so that Year 6 is about selection and development.
Year 6
In Year 6, we provide many opportunities for the children to practise the sentence structures that they have learned throughout. This gives them time to learn about the appropriateness of each sentence type and also to develop their vocabulary further.
Writing at Greater Depth
Writing at Greater Depth involves subtle choices and clear writers' intentions. For those children who are capable of achieving Greater Depth Standard at the end of Year 5 and 6, we introduce a further selection of sentence types (taken from Alan Peat's sentence types) to expand their range.