This is the first of three posts where I’ll share my work towards supporting the students I teach in becoming more confident and competent readers and writers. In this post, I’ll focus on how I’m helping students in grades 7 and 8 develop their writing skills by explicitly teaching them how to identify and construct the four sentence types (declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory) and the four sentence forms (simple, compound, complex, and compound complex) listed in specific expectation B3.1 found in the revised Grades 1 – 8 Language curriculum (2023).
While I am aware, according to the revised Language curriculum, students in intermediate grades 7 and 8 should have a clear knowledge and understanding of sentence forms and types from their previous schooling experiences, my assessments have revealed otherwise. Meaning, while many of the students with whom I work can compose sentences, when I asked them to identify the sentence form or type of sentence they composed, they said that they didn’t know what I meant or they just looked at me with blank stares.
To ensure my language program responds to student learning needs, I’ve incorporated a foundations of literacy component to my program where I explicitly teach students about sentence forms, sentence types, syntax, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and other foundational literacy knowledge and skills. I began with sentences because I understand them to be one of the essential components of writing that students in intermediate grades need to firmly grasp as they start to engage in longer more complex forms of writing. I also began with sentences because I recognized that I could explicitly teach students about syntax, grammar, capitalization and other foundational literacy knowledge and skills while doing sentence work. I arrived at these insights after reading several books on how to teach students to write, one of them being, The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subject Areas, by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler. In it the authors write,
“The importance of spending plenty of instructional time working with sentences can’t be stressed enough. Sentence-level work is the engine that will propel your students from writing the way they speak to using structures of written language. Once they begin to construct more sophisticated sentences, they’ll enhance not only their writing skills but also their reading comprehension. And sentence-level work will lay the groundwork for your students’ ability to revise and edit when they tackle longer forms of writing.”
In preparation for my lessons, I thought about a scope and sequence that would move students from simple to more complex sentence concepts and incorporated the gradual release of responsibility model to slowly transfer the cognitive load from teacher to students to support their success. Recognizing sentence types to be an easier entry point than sentence forms, I began with the four sentence types then moved on to teaching the four sentence forms. When I taught the four sentence forms, I taught them in order from easiest (simple and compound) to more challenging (complex and compound complex).
Here is a brief lesson outline that I used and found positively impacted student learning. I began this lesson by sharing the learning goal and success criteria with students to inform them of what they were learning, why they were learning it, and how they would know when they had been successful in their learning. Here is the learning goal and success criteria I shared with students. Learning Goal: I am learning to create simple declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences to develop my ability to use a variety of sentence types when I write. Success Criteria: I can compose a declarative sentence, an interrogative sentence, an imperative sentence, and an exclamatory sentence. After sharing the learning goal, I then explained that we were studying sentences to help them better organize and communicate their ideas in written form and support their reading comprehension skills.
Next, I had students engage in a hands-on activity to add a kinaesthetic component to the lesson to promote movement and conversation. As a minds on for the introductory lesson to the four sentence types, I placed students in groups of 3 or 4 then had them participate in a matching activity where they matched each sentence type with the meaning/definition and examples. See an image of the activity below. Once students completed their m
atches and I had verified that they were correct, I had them record the sentence type and meaning/definition in their language notebooks for future reference.
When most students had completed the matching activity and recorded the information I requested in their notebooks, I debriefed the activity by having them share their matches. I then explained and modeled when to use each of the four sentence types as an opportunity to review the concept, reinforce understanding, and provide some explicit instruction. For example, to review I asked students to share a definition of a declarative sentence. Listening for the response, a declarative sentence can be a fact, opinion, explanation, or observation. Then, to reinforce their understanding, I said, “when do we use declarative sentences?” Listening for the response, “Writers use declarative sentences to share a fact or facts, an opinion or opinions, provide an explanation or explanations, or share an observation or observations”. Then to provide some explicit instruction, I modeled the creation of each of the four sentence types and co-construction one of each with students before having them work in small groups to create their own examples which I had them record in their notebooks.
The next day, to further review and expose students to the four sentence types, I found a passage from a short story we had read to provide an example of how an author employs the four sentence types in their writing.
After weeks of sentence level work, I administered a quiz to measure my instructional impact on student learning. The assessment revealed that most if not all students fell into one of two categories: either exceptionally well or in need of further practice to continue consolidating their knowledge and understanding. Only a few students fell somewhere in the middle. Again, using assessment data to inform my instruction, I began working with students who required additional support in small groups and 1:1 where possible to provide additional guidance.
Since the start of my lessons on sentence structures several students from the different classes I teach have shared that they didn’t know there was so much to know about sentences and that they feel their ability to construct sentences has improved from the lessons. For me this serves as a reminder that spending the time and energy to explicitly teach students how to construct sentences should not be underestimated.
