Hi Sarah,
Your excitement for these effective practices is warranted, and since you don’t need convincing, I won’t take any time here reiterating how beneficial sentence-writing activities can be for developing students’ reading and writing skills. However, for readers who want to learn more, I’d suggest looking at our free white paper on sentence writing. It has many examples from classrooms at AIM Academy that will likely give you ideas for how you might embed the practices in your classroom. And I agree that these would be fun and engaging activities to use with students at the beginning of the year!
I personally think one of the most powerful aspects of sentence writing activities is that they can be modified to support students at all ages and grade levels and can be integrated into all subject areas. However, there isn’t a mastery point I can offer you so you know when to move on. You’ll need to spend some concentrated time when you first introduce a new activity to establish the routine, but you should also have students engaged in longer writing at the same time rather than waiting to finish something like a sentence-writing unit. This is because, in part, there is always something more you can do with students to help make their sentences richer and more complex. Take sentence combining, for example. In kindergarten, I might ask students to combine simple sentences with a shared subject.
The bird flew.
The bird sang.
Combined: The bird flew and sang.
The same activity in middle school might ask students to combine a series of sentences with sophisticated ideas in a logical way that preserves the relationship between facts.
The new law reduced pollution from factories.
Some environmental groups remained concerned.
The law did not regulate other major sources of pollution.
Combined: Although the new law reduced pollution from factories, some environmental groups remained concerned because it did not regulate other major sources of pollution.
Another way to say this is that with an unconstrained skill like sentence writing, there is no ceiling on the skill- there is no point at which you have learned everything there is to know. Compare it to a constrained skill like naming letters of the alphabet, where there are a finite number of letters to learn and the skill can be checked off as mastered. With sentence writing, instead of the skill being mastered, it is something that we develop throughout our lives, similar to how we never learn all the words there are to know in a language. Sentence writing is foundational to longer composition, and instruction helps students both write and comprehend complex sentences. At the same time, research suggests we teach these abilities in tandem rather than sequentially (e.g., first master sentences, then paragraphs, and finally longer compositions). We can’t teach sentence writing in kindergarten and never touch it again. Similarly, we can’t block off 1st quarter (or some other arbitrary date) for sentence writing, then move on to “more advanced” skills.
It’s true that students need to be taught how to write complex, grammatically correct sentences. It’s also true that students need to be taught how to write and group sentences to form a paragraph. And students also need to learn how to write longer pieces of writing. However, these facts should not be taken to mean students must master each stage required before moving on to the next. Instead, you might think of the instruction as recursive. For example, you might take a lesson to teach and practice adding more details to a basic kernel sentence to create a more detailed, elaborate sentence using sentence expansion. (The dog ran. // After escaping through the open gate, the large, muddy dog ran quickly across the yard.)
Then, while students are working on drafting or revising a longer piece, you might return to this lesson to help students identify a place in their writing where they could improve clarity or sentence variety by expanding a sentence. In other words, students can receive explicit sentence instruction while also learning to plan, draft, and revise longer texts.
Wishing you a wonderful start to a year full of writing!
