Sentence Unscrambling: A Tool for Differentiated Grammar Instruction

 

     It's always tough to know how to start the year with a new group of writers...and this year brings more challenges than most. I'm planning to dust off a tried-and-true instructional technique that yields big benefits to both reading and writing: sentence unscrambling.

     Sentence unscrambling is just one of the four basic sentence composing techniques suggested by Don and Jenny Killgallon, authors of multiple texts and exercise books for teachers. When I use the technique in my classroom, I go a step further and use sentence composition activities to build reading comprehension skills as well as handwriting fluency.

    The great part about sentence unscrambling is that it can be tucked into small bits of the day, and it reinforces everything you want students to be noticing and thinking about as they write. Here's how I built an activity for my students as part of our first unit, in which we explore texts related to oceans.

Find or write a suitable sentence

     When selecting a sentence, think about constructs that students may find intriguing, but challenging. Sentences with capitalized words, interesting word choice, and multiple clauses make for good sentences at the sixth grade level. 

Break up the sentence into meaningful chunks

     These chunks will be what students unscramble. Keeping some words together helps students to see how sentences fit together and will help them in their next sentence composing activity, sentence imitating. 

    So how does this sentence split apart? Deep stays on its own, as an adverb showing location. Under the Pacific Ocean stays together, as a prepositional phrase. The main verb, lives, will be all on its own. Finally, the mysterious giant squid is a group of words that should remain together, as mysterious, giant, and the all modify the noun squid.

Scramble the sentence for students to analyze

     I always keep the first letter of the sentence capitalized, because this is a great clue for students to use as they analyze what could be going on. Otherwise, I try to just do a random scramble.

Analyzing the sentence

    When I introduce the sentence to students, I model how to read the different chunks and think about how the sentence could fit together. My sentence uses some inverted word order, so it adds a bit of a challenge. I encourage students to use a numbering scheme to keep track of their thinking instead of rushing to recopy the sentence. "Hm, which sentence chunk could be first? Ah, here is the one with the capital letter. Which could be next?"

Recopying the sentence

     This becomes a handwriting activity when students have to recopy the sentence correctly. Believe me, there will be some big surprises as you see how kids struggle with this! I always use lines that have a midline so that students can space uppercase and lowercase letters appropriately, and so that I can see who has a good handle on capitalization and who does not.

Differentiating

     Sentence unscrambling has so many differentiation possibilities! Of course you can have variations in the kinds of sentences that you offer. For example, in the above sentence, you could have some with the inverted subject-verb and some without, just to prompt a discussion about what's going on and why. You could also have some students create the sentences and do the chunking. 

     For students with OT concerns, I provide them with larger lines for recopying the sentences. Some students may also need to have the sentences cut up for them so that they can put them together.

Daily Sentence Writing

     If you would like a set of created activities, try Daily Sentence Writing!

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...

Daily Sentence Writing

This year, I've been working on daily sentence composing with my students. Each week, students have been unscrambling, imitating, or combining sentences. I've been able to use this method to teach most of our grammar standards, including prepositional phrases, compound sentences, and subject/verb agreement.

This is based on sentence composing and sentence combining research, with some key differences. First, I incorporated lines to help students improve their handwriting during these activities. Second, while many of the target sentences in other books are from literature, I wrote the sentences for this program. I hate the random examples on typical grammar exercises. It seems that students have to use precious processing power to reset their schema as they go from one sentence topic to the next. If the sentences are all based on one topic, then hopefully students will have more processing capacity to deal with the complexities of sentence composing.

Writing these sentences was hard, but so worthwhile. I have a YouTube playlist for each theme, so students can see the videos during arrival, dismissal, and as transition activities. These videos reinforce the content in the sentences and add new vocabulary words, which students can then take into their sentences and paragraphs.

Each week ends with a paragraph prompt inviting students to write on a topic related to that week's sentences. Often, students have to incorporate an aspect of the week's lesson, such as a compound sentence. Students then check their own work using a highlighter and a red pencil.

Two weeks ago, I joked to the co-teacher in my room, "Well, thirteenth time's the charm!" We had just finished our thirteenth week, and the paragraphs were amazing! Students had to write about their experiences from the point of view of a fish--and they were able to read the prompt, figure out what to do, and weave in their own experiences. One student wrote that he was a shad in the Susquehanna River, using details from our migration simulation in his writing. Considering that I had students who responded in just a single sentence (or a single run-on sentence) at the start of the year, this is great progress.

I've also created several PPTs to go along with the ideas in these lessons. Each PowerPoint includes the examples that I want to show students, along with some interactive elements. Here is the latest one, created to help students learn how to use "sophisticated" transitions:

Combining sentences with the words although and despite from Emily Kissner

Well, the thirteenth time does seem to be the charm! If you are looking for a way to combine grammar with writing, you may want to try creating your own daily sentence lessons. You can purchase the first 8 weeks of mine here. (Part 2 is coming soon!)

And of course the other PowerPoints are available free at Slideshare:
-Imitating Sentences
-Combining Sentences
-Formal and Informal Language (download it to see it properly as I got too fancy with the text boxes)

Spelling, Handwriting, and Daily Sentences

Interesting post about spelling and handwriting by J. Richard Gentry:

5 reasons to teach spelling, handwriting in the new year

It pairs nicely with this article by Steve Graham, published in 2010:

Want to Improve Children's Writing? Don't Neglect Their Handwriting

Now...some back story on handwriting so that everyone remembers the way things used to be in the 1980s and early 1990s. We spent 20 minutes every day on handwriting when I was in elementary school. This handwriting instruction was focused entirely on single letters. I remember vividly learning each cursive letter in second grade, and hoping to be the one chosen to write a letter on the chalkboard. In third grade we had more of the same for handwriting, but only one real writing composition activity in the entire year (a report about a robot...)

Clearly we don't want to go back to this kind of handwriting instruction. But I think we can merge handwriting with sentence composition. Here is one of the daily sentence lessons that I've made for this year. You can see it has lots going on--students are unscrambling the sentences and recopying them with correct punctuation. The sentences are all focused on a theme for the week (anemones!) which was augmented with video clips that we watched at arrival and dismissal.

 The sentence writing area has a dashed midline, which really helps fourth grade writers to make the transition to smaller writing lines. Even at this point in the year I am still talking with students about the relative spacing of their "g"s and lower case "y"s. (Just this week a student said to me, "Hey Mrs. Kissner, look at my g's. Aren't they better?") No one is going to the board to write letters, of course--these conversations happen within the context of the sentence tasks. Each week's practice lessons end with a paragraph writing task with the same dashed lines.

Trying to manage everything that we need to teach is really, really hard. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something! But combining sentence composition activities with handwriting practice is an efficient way to help students grow as writers.

Interested in trying it? The daily sentence activities are in a folder over on Google Drive. Email me with your Gmail account and I will add you to the permissions: elkissn@gmail.com.

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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 Composing

Find classroom-ready sentence composing exercises and activities here: Daily Sentence Writing, Part 1

I'm not a huge fan of the typical daily sentence edit or language practice exercise. Often, they are just too scattered for my tastes. I remember when I dutifully tried to use them in my first years of teaching. "Why are we doing this?" my seventh graders asked, way back in the late nineties. "To practice editing," I answered. But then we would move from the daily practice to our actual writing of the day--and the kids would plunge right into making the same kinds of mistakes that they had just corrected in the exercise at the start of class. Something wasn't connecting.

It wasn't connecting, I came to realize, because the kind of thinking that one does while putting marks on a daily sentence edit is not the same kind of thinking that one uses while writing. So what kinds of activities could I use at the start of class to help students become more aware of their writing? While doing research for other things, I collected journal articles about teaching writing. The research on sentence combining and sentence composing is fantastic! I knew that I wanted to:

1. Help students build fluency with the physical act of writing (see this easy-to-read interview with Steve Graham for more on this)
2. Help students to become aware of mechanics
3. Help students write a variety of sentences
4. Not have a terrible time while doing all of the above

#4 is really important to me. I love being in a content-rich, inquiring environment. And that is one of the reasons that I don't really like a lot of the existing daily edit activities--they are so disconnected and so contrived. So I set myself the tall task of making sentence imitating and combining activities that also teach handwriting, review parts of speech, and (most importantly) aren't awful.

Here is an overview of what I have so far:
Weeks 1-3: Tide Pools theme
Week #1: Copy sentences (really needed in the first week of school!)
Week #2-3: Unscrambling sentences
Week #4: Imitating sentences

Imitating sentences is a very important piece. Sentence imitation has a long history as a technique for teaching writing skills, but it hasn't seemed to gain much traction in elementary school. (This article  provides a nice introduction to the idea of sentence imitation at higher levels. You can find a sentence imitation guide for elementary students here.)

Today we started out with a presentation about sentence imitation. I created this to be highly scaffolded. Can you tell that I'm also trying to teach prepositional phrases at the same time? To build context and interest, I have YouTube playlists to go along with our main topics: tide pools and frogs.

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

...and it worked! Beautifully! The kids wrote lots of different sentences with prepositional phrases. As I walked around, I encouraged kids to show me the subjects, verbs, and prepositions in their sentences.

Here is what the daily sheet looks like. Notice that it has special handwriting lines with a dashed midline. This has really been helpful for my early-year fourth graders who are still working on smaller handwriting.

The next question, of course, will be to see whether this carries over into writing. The Daily Sentence Lessons have an end-of-week paragraph in each set. This week's paragraph asks students to write about their day--a task that I know will prompt them to use prepositional phrases. I'm hoping for the best!