Uplevelling Sentences

What is uplevelling sentences?

Uplevelling sentences is the process of improving an existing sentence by adding a wider range of grammatical features. Children could be asked to uplevel a base sentence provided by the teacher. Alternatively, children might edit their own writing by uplevelling sentences within it.

Here is an example of how a sentence might be uplevelled:

Base sentence: The dragon flew down to his cave.

Uplevelled sentence: After a long flight, the tired dragon swooped down to his warm, cosy cave.

In the example above, a fronted adverbial was used to uplevel the sentence and several adjectives were included to make the sentence more descriptive. The verb 'flew' was uplevelled to 'swooped' too.

There are many ways in which children might be asked to uplevel a sentence and this can be varied depending on what the class is learning about at the time. Here are some possible ways uplevelling sentences could occur:

- Children could be asked to use powerful verbs.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

The witch zoomed through the sky on her broomstick.

- Children could use expanded noun phrases or to improve adjective choice.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

The kind, friendly witch flew through the dark sky on her wooden broomstick.

- Children could lengthen a base sentence by using coordinating or subordinating conjunctions.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick but suddenly heard a terrifying sound!

- Children could be asked to include adverbs to tell the reader more about the verbs.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

The witch flew gracefully through the sky on her broomstick.

- Children could be required to include a sentence starter to uplevel the sentence.

The witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

After making a magical potion, the witch flew through the sky on her broomstick.

Uplevelling Sentences KS2

In KS2, children will become more experienced at editing their own writing. This is a really important part of the writing process and uplevelling sentences will be a very important part of this.

Here are some ways that uplevelling sentences could support children editing their writing:

1. You could use a visualiser to show one of the children's writing on the board. Sentences could be chosen from this to uplevel as a class. If, for example, you are in Year 4 and are focussing on using fronted adverbials, a sentence without one could be chosen and the class could work together to uplevel it. You might have a bank of fronted adverbials displayed for children to refer to. Uplevelling sentences in this supportive way will then help children to do this with their own writing.

2. Instead of just giving children back their writing and asking them to uplevel sentences within it, you could instead be more specific and highlight sentences that you want them to improve by uplevelling. This is really helpful for lower-ability children who might find it really hard to uplevel a whole piece of writing they have done.

3. You could get children to work together to uplevel sentences within each other's writing. The advantage of such collaborative uplevelling is that children have opportunity to learn from each other.

How to use and support uplevelling sentences

If children have not had experience of uplevelling sentences, then it is important to model how to do it in a very structured way. In a shared writing activity, sentences could be displayed on the board and as a class they could be improved. Children might then work with a partner on a whiteboard before feeding back ideas to the class.

To support children uplevelling their writing, providing them with a word bank is realy helpful.

Here at PlanBee we have made a FREE pack containing a range of word banks and base sentences to help support children with uplevelling sentences.

FREE: Uplevelling Sentences Worksheet and Word Banks

LESSON PACK: The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark - Improving Diaries

LESSON PACK: Skellig - Editing and Improving Writing

LESSON PACK: Lost in the Rainforest - Non-chronological Reports - Editing

FREE: Sentence Surgery - Improving Sentences KS2 Worksheet