Teaching Sentence Writing

Teaching sentence writing is a powerful and under-utilized tool in the secondary classroom. While it won’t cook your dinner for you, teaching sentence writing can help in a variety of ways.

1. Students can apply grammar and vocabulary knowledge to sentence writing.

Grammar and vocabulary are both known to best transfer when they are used. By applying them to sentence work, students don’t have to worry about a whole paper.

2. Check reading comprehension quickly with sentences.

Rather than create complicated or one-off exit slips, having students use sentence instruction to show what they know can help you with reteaching. It’s easy to see at a glance to teach and distinguish between content needs and grammatical needs.

3. Reinforce content knowledge.

By focusing sentence work on important content, it allows students to review and retain key knowledge. For more information, I highly recommend The Writing Revolution 2.0 by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler.

4. Improve paragraph and essay writing.

Paragraphs and essays are both just collections of sentences. By teaching sentence writing on its own, students are able to focus more attention on content and organization when they are writing paragraphs and essays.

5. Prevent AI abuse and plagiarism.

I have long believed that kids do well when they can. If students understand both the content and how to write effective sentences, they will be less likely to rely on other tools. Of course, motivating and interesting work matter too [Super-Charge Student Engagement with 5 Powerful Moves].

Sentence Instruction

Introduce or review sentencing using student’s interests. These reviews mainly happen orally and are focused on creating clarity. They are short and sweet. The most important topics involve what makes a complete sentence (versus a fragment or run-on) and ways for making sentences more varied and detailed (such as conjunctions or transitions).

Daily Writing Activities

After students are introduced to different sentence techniques, they can practice each one using class content. You know you’re ready to move on when students show mastery of the current technique.

Teaching Sentence Writing In Order

I’ve created short introductions that will work with older students. In Teaching Sentence Writing: Introductory Activities, you’ll find

• 3 lessons on complete sentences
• 8 lessons on sentence variety and details

Each lesson includes

• Teacher directions so you can dive right in. Includes opportunities to challenge or condense material so it’s right for your classes.
• Slides to walk students through the content.
• Introductory activities that are student-friendly. Keys included where necessary.