So today one of my Y4 children described my literacy lesson as “the best ever”. Bearing in mind that literacy is my least favourite thing to teach I’m taking this as my best win ever in my short teaching career.

Dave (not his real name) loves an apostrophe.  So much so that he machine-guns them into his work.  No word ending in “s” is safe from his sporadic fire; simply put, they are just something you splatter around the page in the hope that some are correct.

Teaching SPaG is something that I just dread.  I find it hard to make interesting sometimes, even though I see it as a necessary evil in order for children to improve their overall writing.  Today was different though.

Teaching literacy and maths in an afternoon, particularly a nice afternoon when we’ve had swimming in the morning and a barbeque lunch, is amongst things I would choose not to do if I was in charge but, armed with a suitable activity from the TES SPaG Board I set off to calm the outbreak of drive-by apostrophe use.

What followed was the most entertaining SPaG lesson ever.  Children were engaged, enjoying themselves and above all, made less mistakes when recognising the possessive apostrophe or the plural noun.  One child told another that he was choosing a particular word because “that’s how I roll” and we had a mass mic-dropping “Boom” at the end of the lesson.

Dave’s safety catch is now on, hopefully this lesson will be remembered and the skills he developed today will transfer to his writing.

Sometimes you just have to forget the script and go with the flow…