KS3 Writing Skills Help Sheets - describe, explain, evaluate

3 Separate Writing Skills Sheets for YR7, YR8, and YR9

I have created these writing skills sheets that focus on helping students develop the following skills:

• Sentence starters with I, WE, YOU task (YR7 and YR8)
• Description (YR7, YR8, and YR9)
• Explanation (YR7, YR8, and YR9)
• Evaluation (YR9)

Each sheet has a box targeting each issue which includes:

• An explanation of how to do it
• Structure ideas (PEEL)
• Sentence starters
• A model example

Sick of giving KS3 students the same sentence starters over and over again? Sick of explaining millions of times what a PEEL paragraph is? Get your KS3 students to stick these in at the front of their books! There is a different sheet for each KS3 year group reflecting a gradual increase in writing skills.

I created these whilst working at a United Learning school in a disadvantaged area where students really struggled with extended writing, but were also really afraid to put their hands up and ask for help. This helped them to help themselves and meant I didn’t have to repeatedly explain structures/sentence starters to students who were too quick to ask for help without trying to work things out for themselves first. Also, the examples come from the UL Ethics curriculum so if you use this it will be directly relevant to the structure/keywords you will be uisng.