Writing Instruction Archives - The Teachers' Library

Writing Topic Sentences about Theme

Lauren Crowley — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 15:17:26 +0000

I wish I could take credit for this idea below, but it’s a great idea I’ve seen others do, so I decided to make this handout for myself, changing a thing or two to fit the needs of my students. Below is a handout that models a formula for creating powerful and coherent topic sentences to introduce a particular literary theme.

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Make a Metaphor Task Cards

Lauren Crowley — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 13:58:34 +0000

When teaching students about metaphor, simile, and personification, I try to encourage them to incorporate these descriptive tools into their own writing, not just to identify them in a poem. This takes constant reminding and reinforcing, as it’s not something that most students do naturally until they become more confident and proficient writers.

Below is a beginner set of make-a-metaphor task cards and a graphic organizer for students to practice distinguishing between the three literary devices, as well as identifying the tone of each one. I remind students that accurately identifying a literary device is not much help, unless they can also infer the tone that the writer is attempting to convey. This is what makes writing truly effective. The third task is to use the mentor sentences, or sentence frames, to create their own version of the literary device while conveying the tone identified.

These task cards can be used as an application activity in pairs or groups; as a timed activity during a stations rotation; or ask exit tickets (without the graphic organizer).

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Using Participles to Describe

Lauren Crowley — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 14:35:57 +0000

When teaching students to write descriptively, I make sure to model for them different grammatical constructions for them to implement in their own writing. I try to limit the amount of grammar jargon I throw at them, but sometimes it’s just not possible to discuss certain sentence structures without certain academic vocabulary.

I use this PowerPoint to introduce them to the specifics of grammatical structures that most of them are in habit of reading all the time, but need an explicit push to incorporate into their own writing. Having miniature white boards makes checking their work a bit more engaging and interactive, as well as giving other students the benefit of seeing and editing others’ work.

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We finish the lesson by making a participle foldable to add into their interactive notebooks.

To reinforce what may be new information, especially for ELLs, I have two worksheets that separate the present from past participles, and show how both kinds of participles can be used as modifiers, either as adjectives or phrases.

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Combing Sentences With Present Participles

Lauren Crowley — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 15:27:46 +0000

Always encouraging my students to write in more concise sentences, I find it helpful to show them various ways to combine sentences while maintaining clarity. One way to do this is by using participle phrases. Many of the pre-made worksheets I find combine present and past participles into one exercise, and my students, many of whom are ELL, find this confusing and overwhelming. I like to teach them about present participles first, as they are easy and regular. I show them how participles can not only be used in verb phrases, but also as modifiers, either as adjectives or participles phrases.

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Get the PowerPoint and accompanying participle foldable for interactive notebooks here!

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How to Use Mentor Sentences in a Secondary ELA Classroom

Lauren Crowley — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 07:36:11 +0000

When teaching grammar, I have often been guilty of teaching concepts in isolation and then drilling students with worksheets and the occasional game. Or I will have students do a quick warm up or exit ticket that requires editing inaccurate writing. Mentor sentences have been the most effective way that I have found to teach sophisticated grammar structures, the intention and effect of those structures, and then encourage students to actually incorporate those structures into their own writing.

The methods of how to use mentor sentences translate across writing lessons, whether it’s writing for clarity, concision, cohesion, or creativity. This post is an introduction to mentor sentences, and specifically how to use them in the secondary ELA classroom.

What they are:

Mentor sentences are simple. They are excellent, effective examples of well-written sentences. They accomplish what the writer intends to communicate.

How they work in the classroom:

Choose a sentence.
- Choose a sentence that successfully models a grammatical concept that you are teaching that day or week.
  
  OR
- Find an effective sentence that you want students to critically engage with. You can pull them from your class text, from a newspaper article or current events site you want to expose them to, or find a pithy quote from a historical figure. The sentences can come from anywhere.
Ask students what they notice about the sentence. This can be in think-pair-share format, Post-it note response, Popsicle stick cold-call, etc. Below is an example of the kinds of observations students could make:
- Punctuation – There are a lot of commas. I see I semi-colon. There are parentheses.
- Vivid use of adjectives – The word putrid is unusual.
- Length of sentences – The sentence has a lot of clauses. The sentence is super long.
- Capitalization – Death has a capital letter. There are words I don’t know with capital letters.
- Similes – Lots of “like” or “as.” Lots of similes about the wind.
- Dialogue – The comma is in front of the quote. The speaker is angry.
Ask students to consider the effects of what they have already identified. This requires much more critical thinking and students benefit from small group discussion before sharing to the larger group. Your questioning their observations will help them consider the effects.
- Punctuation – Are we declaring, questioning, shouting? How will the punctuation help us read the sentence aloud?
- Vivid use of adjectives – What is being described? What images are conveyed to the reader? What connotations do those words evoke?
- Length of sentences – Is the writer setting a scene and using description or is she conveying an action sequence? Why are different sentence lengths appropriate? Who is the audience?
- Capitalization – What are the proper nouns? Who, what, where, when? Is something personified?
- Similes – What is being compared?
- Dialogue – Who is speaking? What do the words reveal about the speaker? Who is his or her audience?
Ask students, “How would the sentence change if…”
- Respond directly to their observations and use the questioning as a tool to push them to more deeply consider what they have already identified.
- As students become more comfortable with the concept of mentor sentences, encourage them to ask these questions to each other.
Students write their own sentences inspired by the mentor sentence!

Ways to use mentor sentences in your classroom:

Below are some ideas of how to incorporate mentor sentences into your own classroom and grammar lessons.

Pre-teach a grammatical concept or structure, such as dependent clauses, FANBOYS commas, punctuating dialogue, passive voice, or participle phrases. Read ahead in your class text to pull out some effective mentor sentence for students to analyze and emulate.
Have students keep a notebook (I prefer binders with sections) where they keep all their grammar lesson notes and all of their accompanying mentor sentence work.
In groups or literature circles, have students identify a mentor sentence as they read together and present to their peers and explanation of how the sentence models the grammatical concept of the week and why it is effectively written.
Challenge students to identify a mentor sentence in a reading from another class and subject. Ask them to articulate what the grammatical concept achieved in that context.
Eliminate parts of the mentor sentence in a Mad-Libs style fill-in-the-blank and have students re-create their
own creative sentences using complex grammatical structures.

Any ideas you’d like to share? Comment below!

The post How to Use Mentor Sentences in a Secondary ELA Classroom appeared first on The Teachers' Library.

Expanding Sentences with Semicolons, Commas, Parentheses, and Dashes

Lauren Crowley — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 06:44:24 +0000

If your students are anything like mine, they overuse parentheses (where they learned this, I have no idea!) and they view semi-colons to be as about as foreign as hieroglyphics. Although punctuation needs continual revision, reinforcement, and practice throughout the year, I have included a PowerPoint that I use to bring everyone to a baseline of rules for the four common punctuation marks needed to expand sentences concisely and coherently.

If students are unfamiliar with independent and dependent clauses, or compound and complex sentences, I have uploaded another PowerPoint to introduce these grammar concepts.

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A great place to find free, printable worksheets is:

http://www.k12reader.com/subject/grammar/punctuation/semicolon/

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Simple, Compound, Complex Sentences

Lauren Crowley — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 14:35:28 +0000

I probably don’t teach as much grammatical jargon as some other ELA teachers; however, I have found that most of my students have a shaky understanding of how to use commas, and sentence types are an essential component of this learning process. The learning objective of this lesson is to be able to correctly punctuate increasingly sophisticated sentences.

I’ve included a PowerPoint that I use to break down simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. I often take the time to make my own worksheets from scratch when teaching grammar, but there are plenty of great resources online for this particular topic. Here are some my go to places:

http://englishlinx.com/sentences/complex_sentences/

https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/sentences.html

http://www.ereadingworksheets.com/languageartsworksheets/sentence-structure/sentence-structure-worksheets/

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Creative Writing Workshop Unit

Lauren Crowley — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 15:08:06 +0000

Below are some the resources that I use when assigning creative writing projects. I put some of them together in a kind of general, one-size-fits-all group of handouts that can help students organize their creative writing.

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array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/character-development-outline-2.pptx”,”Character Development Outline – Download printable PowerPoint with graphic organizer, plot chart, and storyboard”,”pptx”,”154kb”),
array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/writing-workshop-checklist-1.pdf”,”Download creative writing checklist”,”pdf”,”363kb”),
array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/writing-workshop-checklist-1.docx”,”Download creative writing checklist”,”docx”,”86kb”),
array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/peer-review-1.pdf”,”Download peer review handout”,”pdf”,”774kb”),
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Plural vs Possessive Worksheet

Lauren Crowley — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 10:47:21 +0000

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$downloads = array(
array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/plural-vs-possessive.docx”,”Download the worksheet”,”docx”,”91kb”),
array(“https://www.theteacherslibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/plural-vs-possessive.pdf”,”Download the worksheet”,”pdf”,”166kb”)
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Writing Instruction Archives - The Teachers' Library

Writing Topic Sentences about Theme

Make a Metaphor Task Cards

Using Participles to Describe

Combing Sentences With Present Participles

How to Use Mentor Sentences in a Secondary ELA Classroom

What they are:

How they work in the classroom:

Choose a sentence.

OR

Ask students what they notice about the sentence. This can be in think-pair-share format, Post-it note response, Popsicle stick cold-call, etc. Below is an example of the kinds of observations students could make:

Ask students to consider the effects of what they have already identified. This requires much more critical thinking and students benefit from small group discussion before sharing to the larger group. Your questioning their observations will help them consider the effects.

Ask students, “How would the sentence change if…”

Students write their own sentences inspired by the mentor sentence!

Ways to use mentor sentences in your classroom:

Expanding Sentences with Semicolons, Commas, Parentheses, and Dashes

Simple, Compound, Complex Sentences

Creative Writing Workshop Unit

Plural vs Possessive Worksheet