The last thing we needed to learn before moving on to our writing sessions was how to join two independent clauses together. We learned all about coordinating conjunctions, known as FANBOYS – for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. We then worked through a few example sentences in which we had to identify which conjunction had been used. Once we’d identified this, we looked at the independent clauses either side of the conjunction. We identified each verb and subject, allowing us to see how we had two independent clauses with a subject and a verb joined together with one of the FANBOY conjunctions. We also learned that these conjunctions can be used to join more than one subject together to create a compound subject (for example, The moon and the stars).

Crew Hamill have tried really hard to develop their knowledge of verbs, subjects and leftovers by identifying them within paragraphs. We have been looking at unpunctuated paragraphs, with no capital letters, commas and full stops, and have used our knowledge of independent clauses having a subject and a verb to be able to work our where the punctuation belongs. We have found this tricky at times due to some of the vocabulary being difficult to understand but after working on it for a while, we are now much more confident!

Today, we looked at what happens when you are building single-sentence clauses but you have ‘leftovers’ that could belong to either clause you are creating. We followed our script to identify verbs and subjects, then labelled the leftovers that were easier to identify (the leftover at the end belonging to the second clause). We then looked at how the leftover in the middle could belong to either clause. It could be the ending of the first clause, adding extra information, or it could be used at the beginning of the second clause with a comma being used after it. We had a go at doing this in pairs and playing around with the structure of our clauses before completing our exit ticket to illustrate what we had learned.

We continued to identify leftovers (parts of our clause that are not a subject or a verb) during our grammar lesson on Monday. However, we discussed how the sequence we had been spotting during the last few lessons (subject, verb, leftovers) doesn’t always apply and it will not be like that in every single clause we write. As such, we looked at a few examples of where the positioning of these differed. We made sure we followed our script which required us to identify the verb first, then the subject, then the leftovers in order to label these accurately.

Towards the end of this week, we have taken our knowledge of single-clause sentences to the next step by working with ‘leftovers’ – extra information in the sentence that is neither a subject nor a verb. We still had to follow our script in order to identify our verb, followed by our subject but we realised that once we had done this, there was extra words that we hadn’t labelled. We then had to decide which clause these ‘leftovers’ belonged to. Once we’d done this, we could ask ourselves when our subject had stopped doing or being in order to identify the end of the clause. Once we knew we’d got a full, independent clause with a subject and a verb, we were able to add our full stops and capital letters.

After we had done this, we then looked at what these types of single-clause sentences would look like with ‘to be’ verbs, instead of action verbs and repeated the same steps as before.