Strengthening Sentences: Background

Strengthening Sentences: Sentence Imitating, Sentence Combining, and More
Demonstration Lesson by Claudia Dorsey
CUWP Summer Institute 2009

Find the PowerPoint and Handout at
http://strongersentences.pbworks.com/

Background: As we’ve discussed what we should do to help our students improve their writing, I and my fellow seventh grade teachers at American Fork Junior High, keep coming back to the idea that many of our students (actually most, if not all) need help at the sentence level.

Trying direct instruction, we kept hearing, “What is a noun?” and “Isn’t the word 'I' a proper noun?” Selectively pointing out repeated errors in their papers for them to work on often failed because they didn’t understand what we were trying to tell them. Daily oral language became “once-in-awhile” oral language because I wasn’t seeing transfer to student’s own writing.

Research had nixed many of the strategies I’d tried, but there was some positive talk among experts (the ones who weren’t nay-sayers about all such efforts) concerning sentence combining and imitating.

I’ve used sentence combining. When I was new to teaching junior high in the ‘90s, the materials I was handed along with the keys to a classroom included sheets of sentence combining activities, and I used them now and then. Does anyone remember the classic “Tucker was a trucker. He was stuck. He was in the muck. He was out of luck. He was near Winnemucca.”?

The now and then combining didn’t seem to do much for my students, or for me. Now I realize that I had only a shallow understanding of how to help my students through sentence combining.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Killgallon’s Sentence Composing for Middle School, and was excited at the possibilities, but once again, I wasn’t consistent. Part of the problem was that I was trying to follow too closely what I saw as the program prescribed in the book, and my students (and I) grew weary too soon. Again this year I did a little of each, but still was not consistent enough to make any real progress.

Curious, and feeling that if applied correctly, these practices could positively impact student writing, I’ve decided to again do daily sentence work – at least most days – and with an increased understanding of how to make it work for both me and the students. So here goes. . .