When you have to sit down and grade a stack of papers, are you reminded once again that students’ writing can be boring! Do you see lots of papers in which the sentences relentlessly begin with the subject and then the verb?
Middle school students seem to be programmed to write in one of two ways, either subject, verb, subject, verb, over and over, or, in the way we talk, with tons of run-ons and fragments. I’ll leave the run-ons and fragments for another day, but on the subject of students’ writing in which every sentence begins the same way, I do have some suggestions.
There is a lot that we can do at the middle school or upper elementary level to improve the situation by teaching kids about the variety of sentence patterns that are out there and then giving them opportunities to practice each one.
This note sheet, from Vary Sentence Patterns – Notes and Practice, shows students lots of possibilities, including various sentence structures, sentence beginnings, and sentence types.
Here, on my first activity page, is a chart that kids can fill out with the different choices. At the bottom of the page, there is also a short practice exercise in which students rewrite sentences using a particular sentence structure.
The other two activity sheets provide more practice, including multiple-choice questions, sentences to rewrite using different beginning words or different sentence types, pictures to write about using particular sentence patterns, and a paragraph to revise.
These activities are all designed to support the Common Core Standard: Vary sentence patterns for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style.
To follow up after the individual practice, how about a challenge activity? Give students a topic and then have them write a sentence in two different ways about that topic. Then each student should challenge a partner, or the class, by reading his or her first sentence aloud and then asking the other student(s) to write it the second way.
A game would be a fun follow-up, too, such as a contest in which the teacher gives the class a sentence and then challenges the students to each rewrite it in the most interesting way that they can. Students can present their responses for scores of 1 to 5 to be held up by classmates, as in a singing contest.
With all of this practice behind them, hopefully students will begin to use some of these interesting sentence patterns in their own writing, and who knows, maybe the next stack of papers that you sit down to grade will have a few nice surprises waiting for you!
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