Milestone One

At Larch Tuition, our first milestone lays the foundation for young learners as they embark on their writing journey. This stage is all about introducing fundamental writing concepts and skills. Students learn to select basic ideas and content that are closely linked to the purpose of a task. They may create formulaic openings or endings for stories, add information to label pictures, or provide simple instructions. Word choice plays a crucial role, as they use simple vocabulary that effectively conveys information and ideas, often related to the story or topic at hand. Basic proofreading becomes a habit as they re-read their work to ensure that it makes sense.

Students begin to sequence sentences to form short narratives, usually incorporating simple opening or closing phrases. They understand sentence boundaries and can identify them in spoken language. Simple sentences with straightforward subject-verb agreement become familiar, and they leave spaces between words and start punctuating with capital letters and full stops. They also learn to use capital letters for names, days of the week, and "I."

Throughout this milestone, students start developing awareness about organising ideas and events, using simple time-related words, numbers, or the order of pictures and captions. They also learn to link ideas and events with connecting vocabulary. The introduction of personal pronouns, exclamation marks, and compound sentences with the coordinating conjunction "and" expands their writing repertoire. Their learning journey continues, focusing on building reliable writing skills with simple and compound sentences while punctuating with exclamation marks.