Filton Hill School

Build, Challenge, Agree

 

It is important for all children to acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and a knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language.  With this in mind we have now developed sentence stems for the children to use when answering questions in class.  The children are either asked by the teacher to build on another child's answer or challenge their answer if they disagree or agree with their answer if they were thinking the same thing. They must start their answer with one of the sentence stems displayed in their classroom.  Build, challenge and agree also have hand gestures for the children to display, which they enjoy using.

                                                               

We have adopted this approach across the school and each class has age appropriate sentence stems to refer to, when answering. 

We strongly believe that this approach will ensure that the children are competent in the art of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.  Examples of some sentence stems are displayed below.