Sunday, August 21, 2022

Warm Up Your Students' Writing Skills





Here comes back to school, ready or not! 

It’s that time of year when only we teachers understand feeling sad to see the end of summer, but at the same time, feeling excited to meet a new group of students who will quickly become an important part of our lives.
 
ELA students usually need a warm-up to sharpen their writing skills Here are some thoughts for an ELA lesson you might find helpful. This is how I presented it to my students.
 
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Sentence combining is a writing process that can enrich your writing and help you make good stylistic choices. The best way to learn to write is to write and write and … well, you get it.
 
This technique challenges you to look at a group of basic sentences and then determine how they could best be combined into one or more interesting sentences that will have more style and make more interesting reading.
 
Moving words, phrases, and clauses into different positions and combining them can transform a sentence.
 
For example:
The athlete is talented.
The athlete is learning skills.
The skills are new.
The skills are difficult.
 
One way to combine these basic sentences might be:
 
The talented athlete is learning new and difficult skills.
 
Here’s another set of basic sentences to combine:
There was a car.
The car was red.
The car had a luxurious interior.
The interior was black.
The interior was leather.
 
You could combine these basic sentences like this:
 
The red car had a luxurious black leather interior.
or 
A luxurious black leather interior was in the red car.
 
Which one is better? That is a matter of opinion. Yours.
 
Here’s one cluster of sentences to combine. You try it. 
Combine these five basic sentences into one sentence with style.
 
He thought about his dorm room.
It was narrow.
It had a low ceiling,
It smelled like pizza.
The smell was stale.
 
(At this point, I would give my students an exercise to practice combining sentences.)
 
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If you would like to offer your students more practice with sentence combining, I have four exercises ready to go. You can buy them individually, but the bundle will save you 20% off the individual resources These exercises require no preparation. Everything is ready to print and go. Some of the resources can be used in three ways. Print, use in Google™ Drive, or in Easel™ by TpT.



I hope you have a great school year. You will find a FREE Back-to-School eBook with resources from members of The Best of Teachers Marketing Cooperative (TBOTEMC) here. If you are not a member and would like to join this marketing cooperative, visit this link. 

Thanks for reading,
Charlene

Here are some great blog posts from my teacher friends on TBOTEMC.
Enjoy!

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