SATs revision: your KS1 SATs English helper

Practise little and often
Try to set aside 10 or 15 minutes a day to read with your child. A short burst of reading every day won't feel like hard work but will really help them build up their reading skills over time.

Enjoy a range of texts
It's great to read stories, but the SATs test will include non-fiction texts too. Next time you take your child to the library, direct them to the non-fiction section instead of making a beeline for the story books and allow them to choose a variety of books that interest them. It may be a good idea to let them browse these books on their own and then ask them later about the facts they have learnt.

Use books as a starting point
If your child is excited about a particular book or story, use this as a means to get them enthusiastic about writing. Encourage them to do a writing task related to the story they are reading, for example: writing a diary entry as a particular character, writing another scene for a story or writing a description of a particular picture they like in the story.

Pile on the details
Use of description is really important in fiction. Show your child a picture from a story and encourage them to fill a page with lots of descriptive phrases about the picture. Tell them that punctuation is not important at this stage, but good ideas are! Help them to imagine that they are 'in' the picture and ask them to talk about what they can see, hear, feel and smell. Once they have jotted down all their ideas, help them to write these ideas into full sentences. 

If your child writes using lots of short, simple sentences, this is a great opportunity to begin to encourage them to join (or extend) sentences using connectives such as 'and', 'but', 'because' and 'so'.

Have a go at different genres
Again, don't just focus on writing stories. Encourage your child to write non-fiction texts such as instructions for playing a game, a letter to their favourite author, a non-chronological report or explanation text about a topic they are interested in, a recount of an important day in their lives. Look up these non-fiction genres in TheSchool Run primary literacy glossary to find out more about them and how teachers guide children through the process of writing these texts.

Look out for your child's spelling mistakes when they are writing and encourage them to write in neat, joined handwriting. Writing spellings out several times in joined writing can really help children to remember all the letter strings within words.

Most children in Year 2 will be writing 'joined-up' by the end of Key Stage 1. If you are worried about their penmanship it might be worth checking they are using the correct joins between each letter as these habits can be hard to break at a later stage!