How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Sentences
How to teach writing – Part 1
You tend to find that specific students have a penchant for particular techniques. Thomas always focuses on alliteration. Sam can spot a simile a mile off. Or, if you are lucky, as I once was, they can spot any religious reference in a text. For me, it is sentence types. I will come back to them later, as I am somewhat obsessed with them. I love finding new sentence types. I love teaching sentences. I love exploring the meaning behind the construction of a sentence.
Several years ago, I came across an idea by Alan Peat that I have used again and again. Modelling is important and the more we can do it the better for our students. I am the role model at the front of the class. I should be setting the example. Yes, you can, and should, openly make mistakes to show you are human but, importantly, you should be an example to model, mimic and copy. Just don’t copy my dress sense or mannerisms.5
Alan’s idea is simple. You take a particular grammatical structure and name it — for example: the more, the more sentence.
The more I waited, the more I worried.
You explicitly teach students the sentence construction. Help them to see how and why the sentence is constructed in that way. You can also draw attention to the use of punctuation, aiding and developing their control of the same. Afterwards, get students to create their own in isolation.
The more I looked, the more I panicked.
The more she ate, the more the people in the restaurant noticed her.
Then I get students to write a paragraph which includes the structure. Over a couple of lessons, I can cover about ten of these structures. We then write a longer text incorporating them all. All the time, I am modelling the process of writing. As I have been doing this for years, I have collated examples into a booklet for most units. They make a nice homework, starter or even intervention strategy. The students have to create three different examples using the structure in the model.
My sentence obsession is so bad that I am constantly looking for new ones. Each book I read serves up a collection to mimic and use. Teach one sentence a week and a student could have thirty different ones before the end of the year. I even get students to find and name their own. This allows them to identify the key components of sentences in a way that they can replicate in their own writing. Students are focused on the structure more than the content when they do this. For example, a student of mine named one structure a ’happy/sad’ sentence.
The children laughed and giggled as the soldiers lifted the corpse off the ground.
Alan Peat has a number of different resources and apps linked to the idea and they do help students to develop and improve their writing. I’d highly recommend his Writing Exciting Sentences: Age Seven Plus and his website for resources.6