Enhancing Grammar by Imitating Sentences

In 20 years of teaching, I've learned a thing or two about teaching grammar. Specifically, I've noticed:

• Worksheets don't work!
• Learners have trouble attaching meaning to grammar terms
• What's taught in grammar class doesn't always show up in student writing

It's not all bad news, though. In fact, I've learned a fantastic technique for helping students to become better writers AND learn grammar at the same time. This technique is simple, easy to use, and easy to differentiate. What is it?

Imitating sentences

That's it. And this year, I really want to go back to this technique (I've been rather pressured to do the worksheet method over the last two years) to start the year.

Benefits of imitating sentences

• Students learn how to identify the chunks of sentences: Sentence parts like subject, verb, and prepositional phrase become more concrete when students break sentences into meaningful chunks.
• Students gain control over their writing: When imitating sentences, students learn how to merge content with form. They don't use a particular verb form because it's the first one they think of, but because it's the verb form that is used in that sentence.
• Students try new forms: Sentence imitating is a great way to get kids noticing and using more sophisticated sentence forms. It's a powerful way to help students notice the beautiful portability of adverbs and adverbial phrases, the use of punctuation in a sentence, and the way that authors can use repetition for style and effect.

Getting started with imitating sentences

To read more about sentence imitating and sentence composing, visit this website by Don and Jenny Killgallon.

Here is an introductory PowerPoint that I made to share with my students. (The formatting problems resolve if you download...sorry! Slideshare doesn't like text boxes very much.)

Imitating Sentences: A Tool for Better Sentence Writing from Emily Kissner

You don't have to have fancy materials...all you need are some great sentences and a sense of adventure! Take sentences from your literature series, from a book that you are sharing, from the day's read aloud.

When I taught fourth grade, I put together a targeted sentence writing curriculum that went week by week through the Common Core grammar standards. It worked so well! Now I'm thinking that I'll have to come up with something similar for sixth grade...sigh...

Sentence Combining

I really love using sentence composition activities as teaching tools for writing and grammar. This year, most of my grammar instruction has come from sentence modeling, sentence imitating, and sentence combining--and I really am seeing the carry over into writing.

In a few weeks, we're going to start on some more difficult sentence combining. Sentence combining is a great strategy for improving grammar and writing. (For more on sentence combining read this article by Bruce Saddler and Kristie Asaro-Saddler.) I took advantage of the snow day to create a PowerPoint to introduce sentence combining:

Sentence Combining from Emily Kissner

You may notice that there are many water pictures in this presentation. I'm dreaming of summer! Also there are lots of wading birds--mostly because they are the most obliging birds and will stay still long enough for me to take a picture of them.

Notes
-February Homework is up and running! I made over the old Winter Homework texts and added an advertisement and a myth...Theseus and the Minotaur.
-Here is a link to my playlist of videos that go along with the homework texts. I'm hearing from teachers that they are using the texts for small group instruction or intervention as well as homework...that's great feedback.
-Right now I'm working on having my cake and eating it too: Making a social studies United States regions unit that is also differentiated fluency instruction. Is anyone else interested in such a thing? Tweet

Sentence Variety

December is a great time for focusing on sentences...they're short! I like to squeeze in some lessons about sentence variety in between the Santa's Workshop, choral concerts, sing alongs, and other holiday cheer.

When I teach about sentence variety, I start out by helping students to understand what the word variety means. A very tangible way to do this is to bring in a variety of something...whether it is a variety of candy, a variety of fruit, or a variety of toys, being able to experience variety helps students to understand why it is something they might want to use in their writing.

Once students understand what variety means, we look at how to add sentence variety to their writing. The best way that I have found to do this is to have students go back through their journals and find a piece that they have written. Then, they count the number of words in sentences and make a list of the first word in each sentence. I model how to use this information as a starting point for revising for sentence variety. What can we do if we find out that all of the sentences have the same number of words? How can we revise to use different sentence beginnings?

Students pick up on these ideas pretty quickly. Even struggling writers can notice that all of their sentences begin with the same words, and can find some ways to make improvements. For the weeks approaching the holiday break, this is about all that I can ask for!

Here's a link to a Sentence Variety Powerpoint that I just uploaded at Teachers Pay Teachers. (It's free, but you do have to register.)

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sentence-Variety-Powerpoint