openers – SJB Teaching

Every classroom in my school has to have a VCOP display. In fact as a supply teacher I’ve been in a lot of classrooms, and every single one of them has had a VCOP display, so I’m assuming it’s something on Ofsted’s ticklist.

Now don’t get me wrong – I like VCOP. I know it has a lot of opponents, but I find it a very useful teaching tool, and like every tool its success depends on how you use it. I’m not a big fan of taking it out of context and treating it as four separate elements that children have to shoehorn into their writing, and to me a VCOP display does that.

This display is my solution. My children are Deaf and for many of them BSL is their first language. They find English sentence structure difficult, so I have put up this display to demonstrate the structure of a standard English sentence. It would work equally well for EAL and EFL students, and I’m sure it could also be adapted for the MFL classroom, although I haven’t tried that yet.

I have my Openers at the beginning of the sentence, where they belong, and my Punctuation at the end, also where it belongs. Connectives are underneath punctuation, to show that they are used to join two sentences together. Vocabulary is spread over four panels – Nouns (subject and object), Verbs and Adjectives.

Like everything with teaching, once you’ve done it, you think of a better way to do it, and next time I’ll move the adjective panel to just before the object instead of just before the subject. I think adjectives are probably used more to describe the subject than object, and it means that I could also have a S V A structure (The rose is pink) in the middle of the longer structure. It’s still a work in progress and I do plan to split the subject panel into nouns and pronouns, and the white panel needs an “or number” halfway down. Other than that, I’m quite happy with it so far.

In addition to providing them with a standard structure sentence, it is exposing them to grammatical terms, and already one of the boys in the class has asked what the word “article” means and what it’s for.

So there you have it. Nobody can accuse me of not having a VCOP display in my classroom, but I’ve managed to turn it into something more useful.

O is for…Openers. Read this story and then decide what is wrong with it:

The grumpy, old man looked out of his window and saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden. The grumpy man shouted loudly at the scruffy dog to go away. The dog looked nervously at the man, but then he carried on scrabbling in the dirt. The man stormed out of the house because he was so angry with the dog. The dog stopped and the old man noticed that the dog had uncovered an old, wooden treasure chest.

That’s right – every sentence starts with ‘The’. There are some interesting ideas for a story, and there is some good vocabulary, but the readers will still be really bored by the end because the openers are all the same.

You can liven up your writing by remembering just two different ways of opening a sentence.

My favourite way is to start with an ‘ing’ word: Looking out of his window, the grumpy, old man saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden. If you can’t start your sentence like this straight away, write out a boring sentence first and underline the verbs. This will make it easier to see which word to turn into the ‘ing’ form and move to the start of the sentence: The teacher glared at the class and told them to be quiet. This becomes: Glaring at the class, the teacher told them to be quiet.

The second easy way to make your writing more interesting is to start with a connective. Two simple ones to use are ‘when’ and ‘while’. When the grumpy, old man looked out of his window, he saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden. While the grumpy old man was looking out of his window, he saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden.

Try these ways of opening a sentence, and your teacher will quickly notice an improvement in your work. When you are confident with these, you can experiment with lots more different ways of starting a sentence.

with an adverb: Sleepily looking out of his window, the grumpy, old man saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden.
with an adverbial phrase: Early in the morning, the grumpy, old man looked out of his window and saw a scruffy, brown dog digging up his garden.
with speech: “Get out of my garden!“ shouted the grumpy, old man.
with a question: Why was the old man so grumpy?

Have a look at some books and see how many different ways you can find.