Spiced Up Sentences!

Sentence Fluency Lesson Plan

Dawn Drake

LITC 522

6/30/10

Learning Target• Students will increase sentence fluency

skills through revision of simple, bland sentences.

State Standards EALR 3: The student writes clearly and

effectively. Component 3.2: Uses appropriate style. GLE 3.2.3:

– K-1: Understands sentence fluency.– 2-3: Uses more than one sentence type and structure.– 4-7: Uses a variety of sentences.– 8-10: Uses a variety of sentences consistent with

audience, purpose, and form.

Materials• Paper—lined and blank

• Pen/Pencil

• Markers, crayons, and colored pencils

Procedure1. Discuss with students what makes a sentence interesting.

(Example ideas: exciting adjectives, diverse vocabulary, varying length, descriptive details, etc.)

2. Students will write their own simple sentences. (Example: I went for a swim.)

3. Teacher will collect and redistribute sentences and direct students to consider specifics of the circumstance in the sentence. (Example: Where did you go swimming? When did you go? Why did you go? With whom did you go? Did you come back?) Students will use the answers to these questions to add color and spice to their sentence using detail and description. (Example: I went for a midnight swim when my date pushed me into the water.)

Procedure (cont’d)4. Students will fold over the new sentence

they have written, so that only the original simple sentence shows, and rotate their papers around the room. When they receive a new sentence, students will repeat step #3 to create a new spiced up sentence.

5. Repeat steps #3 & 4 until each simple sentence is accompanied by at least 5 spiced up sentences.

6. Share several of the original simple and spiced up sentences out loud. Have students discuss which they liked best and why: What elements made a particular sentence “spicy”?

Procedure (cont’d)7. Have each student choose the best

spiced up sentence they wrote. They will write the original simple sentence and their spiced up version on a blank piece of paper and decorate it. Each student will submit a decorated page to be compiled into a book of class spiced up sentences (you can offer extra credit for a student to bind the pages, decorate the covers, etc).

Assessment Informal observation during writing

process (and/or teacher can have students initial by each spiced up sentence they write).

Formal assessment of book pages (teacher discretion or add a component to lesson where students create a rubric for assessment).

Adaptations K-3: Create the simple sentences ahead of

time. Do steps #3-5 as a class. Have class as a whole vote on the best spiced up sentences. For students with little/no writing skills, prepare the book pages for them and have them decorate the next day. Alternately, you could post the paired simple and spiced up sentences on a bulletin board.

4-7: Rather than making a book or bulletin board, have students post their favorite simple and spiced up sentence pairs on a class blog, web page or wikispace and comment on each other’s sentences.

8-12: Have students extend their favorite spiced up sentence(s) into a poem, song, or short story. Class can brainstorm ideas, if necessary.

Source Citation Source Citation: Idea for this lesson taken

from Dena Wagner’s website: http://csmstu01.csm.edu/st03/dwagner/super_sentence_lesson_plan.htm.