My approach is to take a reading stimulus from a range of sources: newspapers, magazines, novel extracts, ABC articles, textbooks and on a range of topics.
Here is some of our stimulus material:
Slug Poo and Mushrooms (New Scientist)
Spider webs and hearing (New Scientist)
Exercise and your brain (ABC article)
Social Media and Defamation (ABC article)
Blue Banded Bees (The School Magazine)
Short stories – ‘Buried’, ‘Sound Wave’, ‘Family Gathering’ – (The School Magazine)
I have written other materials on participles and appositives, however they draw extracts from lots of places. We’ve also got stuff prepared on rain forests drawn from stage 4 geography textbooks.
The point of engaging with a range of stimulus is to try and keep the reading and ideas as interesting as possible even though we are doing a lot of hard work focusing of building vocabulary, language conventions, and writing.
You can preview the resource on ‘Blue Banded Bees’ below. If you like it, you can also download it. Hopefully it is of some use to you.
I’ve returned to school and one of the things I am doing is creating resources for the COVID ISLP program. I don’t have time to write about it now, but below you can find two samples of the work.
As a general outline, each lesson the small group completes the ‘Do Now’ activity, the vocabulary tasks, the reading or language focus activity before they return as a whole group and complete a ‘Blooket’ or ‘Gimkit’ where we try and make things a bit of fun and competitive through the games available.
These two resources work well together as they address the same language focus. Hope it is useful to you.
I’ve been really busy and I know everyone else has too.
I’ve quickly put together a simple resource to accompany some of the sentence craft stuff I’ve shared. I’ve made this activity into either a word document or a google slide. What I plan to do with this is to print out the slides and laminate the different sections and create student card sets.
I want to use this as a simple tactile task where students can manipulate the sentences structures easily and without any extra fuss, and hopefully reuse the activity many times without needing to reprint. I’ve colour coded it for easy reference for the kids. You know:
‘Everyone, look at the yellow card’
‘Does anyone have the yellow card at the end of the sentence? What about in the middle?
What do we notice about the red word? It’s an action verb!
Of course, you could print the word document and students complete the task in their books by cutting out the sections and sequencing them, or they could use the google slide and organise the relevant phrases digitally.
This isn’t comprehensive and represents about 25 minutes of work while sitting at the playground after collecting my kids from school.
In this post I’ll give you a strategy that can help students understand that verbs power sentences and create motion picture images. Students often choose weak verbs like ‘went’, ‘looked’ or ‘moved‘ whereas professional authors avoid these to keep action moving. Some students have trouble of thinking of verbs and the activity below is a good way to help them.
In The Art of the Sentence I provided a slide deck to support your students to use action verbs, but in this post I want to provide a simple teaching activity teaching activity from Natalie Goldberg which may be useful during this period of remote learning.
Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones designed an activity called “The Action of a Sentence”.
The Action of a Sentence
Fold a sheet of paper in half.
On the left fold, students write ten or more nouns
On the right fold students create a list of 10 or more verbs from a specific occupation. Goldberg says “Think of an occupation; for example a carpenter, a doctor, a flight attendant,”
Unfold the list and create interesting combinations and sentences.
Here is Goldberg’s example:
Natalie Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones, p88
Here are some of the interesting images she came up with:
Dinosaurs marinate the earth
The lilacs sliced the sky into purple
The fiddles boiled the air with their music
This would be a simple task to assign students during remote learning.
In this post I’ll show you a few ways to embed the basic subordinate clause into your teaching. This is one of the clauses assessed in Australia’s National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This approach can be used with the various sentence structure concepts I outlined in The Art of the Sentence.
This approach is easily differentiated – for struggling writers you focus on learning how to write the structures, and for stronger writers you can use the structures as way of teaching and embedding grammatical knowledge and concepts.
Below is the Stage 3 indicator for Outcome EN3-6B (this is built upon in EN4-4B and EN5-5B).
understand the difference between main and subordinate clauses and that a complex sentence involves at least one subordinate clause (ACELA1507)
The general ‘rule’ is that when you begin a sentence with one of these words, you are likely to need a comma at some point to separate the clause. The image below contains the common subordinating conjunctions, easily remembered by the mnemonic AAAWWUBBIS (ah-woo-bis). NAPLAN training uses the mnemonic of A White Bus.
Here is a table of examples of this structure
The approach
How can I make this content statement part of a regular instructional practice and not as a standalone grammar instruction unit? The steps below are a rough guide of what I do, progressively adding detail.
Begin with a model sentence(s) and interrogate what kids notice about the model sentence. Ideally this should be the simplest model you can find to explain the concept.
Draw attention to the use of punctuation and discuss what the punctuation in doing in the sentence.
Imitate the sentence as a joint class construction.
Provide opportunity for independent imitation of the model sentence. This will give you rapid formative feedback on student skill.
Look for examples of the structure in the texts your class is reading. Collect examples and use these as WAGOLL samples (What A Good One Looks Like).
Repeat this routine on a daily basis with different models. Provide a mnemonic to remember the common subordinators
Interrogate the model sentence – where are the verbs, which part is the essential meaning, can the sentence be rearranged without impact on the meaning, which part can be deleted and the sentence still make sense, which part is only a ‘part of a sentence’.
Consider naming the relevant parts (main clause, subordinate clause)
Look for examples in daily texts.
Quick write opportunities with the success criteria being the use of this sentence structure. Students review their piece identifying the concept.
Other activities
The key is to continue to embed these concepts into daily conversation and writing. Apart from some of the writing activities mentioned above (Quick Writes and Imitation of model sentences) here are a couple that I think are great to do to reinforce and develop these ideas further:
Chapter titles
Parallel writing structure
Chapter titles
One activity is to get students to write chapter titles using only the subordinate clause. These are titles that begin with the common subordinators in the list above. It is an easy task to implement and it provides the necessary practice that some students need. It also gives you the opportunity to discuss the grammar of the sentence, if the students are ready for that.
Here are some samples for you:
When in Rome
While the City Sleeps
Until Day Breaks
Because of Winn-Dixie
Before Sunrise
If Looks Could Kill
Since Vietnam
parallel writing structures
Parallel structures are a way to create rhythm and beat in writing. We can use grammatical and literal repetition to help students to emulate professional author craft.
Harry Noden uses this sentence as the base for students to build some parallel structures:
“The old cabin made me feel close to nature.”
He then adds the subordinate conjunction when:
“When I awoke to the aroma of burnt fire logs, when I looked out the window and saw the morning fog roll across the lake,when I felt the slight chill of the mountain air, the old cabin made me feel close to nature“
You can see how the rhythm and beat has been impacted by this grammatical and literal repetition. If they know the model, then look for ways to help them use it. Ask them to create parallel structures using the subordinating conjunctions.
Other resources
You can download this explicit slide deck, if it is useful to you, on the subordinate conjunctions. You can find it in the Art of the Sentence post.
I had a request for a resource on Boy Overboard by Morris Gleitzman and so here it is!
If you want to ignore the explanation behind the resource and how I’ve designed it for you to pull bits and pieces from, scroll down to the bottom and you can find where to download the resource.
Otherwise, permit me a couple of minutes to explain my method.
A lot of the resources I’ve made are based on the first chapter or two of novels because, regardless of what is in my book room, I know I can find the chapter preview online, or in my local library.
But I also use this method as a way of introducing kids to a range of books that they might decide to read themselves. The final reason is to produce a model that other teachers can follow – its kind of like stealth professional learning.
So, as an overview, this is what is included.
Library of sentences
I’ve gone through the first two chapters and found models structures that you can choose to focus on, depending on the needs of your class. I’ve tried to save you time by listing some examples for you. This is not exhaustive, but it is a good beginning.
Here is a selection of the different models that you can teach kids from the first two chapters of this text. The grammatical term is not the focus and I have only included it here and in the document for your knowledge.
Participles
Panting, she gives me a proud grin.
I climb up out of the gully and up onto a sand dune, peering into the wind.
These are easy to teach kids and immediately improves the visual detail of their writing. As an aside, grammatically these belong to the non-finite clause category…and guess what the higher bands in NAPLAN want? They want a variety of clause structures, including non-finite clauses.
Absolutes
She’s only metres away from us now, eyes glinting as she dribbles the ball with her bare feet.
There are not a lot of examples in this chapter of the absolute, although that is partly because I am not familiar with all the various structures they take. The most common is the NOUN + ING, or NOUN + adjective. And guess what…another non-finite clause…you know what that means…
Delayed adjectives
It’s a great shot, low and hard.
There are a couple of these examples. I often teach this concept to my year seven kids within the first week. I want them to stop using 3 or four adjectives in a row and start to think about where to place them, that is, they can go after the noun. I’ve seen lots of Primary teachers show kids from Year 3 and up how to do this.
Adjectival/Relative clause
I hurry towards my ball, which is lying against one of the tanks huge caterpillar tracks.
I don’t reach the grammatical name to kids, just how to write a sentence which extends the visual detail. I want them to have whole lot of tools to draw from when writing. This is a nice example which shows more detail from the scene. (*Ahem…variety of clause structures and that test…)
Subordinate clause
‘Bibi,’ I yell as I scramble up the side of the rocket crater.
Zoltan is looking at me as though an American air strike has hit me in the head and scrambled my brains.
There are many examples of this structure, and unfortunately, this is the basic structure that NAPLAN refers to when it talks about subordinate clauses. I use the acronym AAAWWUBBIS when teaching this.
As an aside, here is a little activity I regularly do to embed this structure and teach the grammar in context. l get kids to write a chapter titles of any material we’ve read using this sentence part. Here are some movie/book titles using this structure:
After the Fall
Although the Day is Not Mine to Give
As Good as it Gets
When in Rome
While the City Sleeps
Until Day Breaks
Because of Winn-Dixie
Before Sunrise
If Looks Could Kill
Since Vietnam
You can do this activity with any book. I’ll probably make this into a post itself.
Action verbs
I slither into the gully.
To be honest, revising and choosing better verbs is an accessible activity for kids. I haven’t listed many from this text because…well…I ran out of time.
Pre reading activities
A simple story impressions activity. I wrote about this activity in this post, if you need more information.
Post reading activities
3 Level Reading Guide (Here, Hidden Head)
Again, this is to try and save you some time – you choose what is right for your class.
3 Level Reading Guides (Here, Hidden, Head) are a great way to get students discussing their reasoning. I think it is one of the good ways to develop inferencing skills.
Comprehension Questions
Maybe you want some full sentences answers written in their book – then comprehension questions are a good choice.
Language activities
I’ve written a few activities based on the sentence models. I haven’t designed this so that you would ask a student to do every single one, but you select the activity pertinent to your students. It might be as simple as find the structure in the text (you’ve got the answers in the sentence model library), or it might be a simple unjumble or sequence. You could use add them to the comprehension section, or you could project an activity on the board for the students to complete as a ‘Do Now’ task when they enter your classroom
Let’s write
I’ve made a simple writing task where students respond to an image. I usually ask for one to two paragraphs, but I ask them to include the structure(s) that we have been looking at in class. It means that we get to continually practice and reinforce these key focus areas.
I make it a points system which means that we are focusing on the mechanics and style and not the ideas. The added bonus is that students assign the points themselves and I do a check validate. This is rapid marking, and it can be done in class as your review their short paragraph. I think this is one way of working smarter.
I’ve taken this concept from Harry Noden’s work which I wrote about in The Art of the Sentence. You can adapt this to include peer review, and it is a peer review task that works because the criteria is so explicit and focused.
I’ll aim to keep releasing something I think is classroom ready and applicable each week, so if you’d like, subscribe by email and you’ll get it direct to your inbox. As always, feel free to leave a comment.
Everyone knows that inference is one of the weakest skills identified by NAPLAN. I’m not pretending that what I outline below is the only way to teach inference, but one tool for teaching this skill to struggling students. The way I have found success is through combining reading and writing skills.
So, in this post you will get a tool to help teach inference and a slide deck to support that instruction.
Essentially, we use sentence models to show students how authors craft inferences and get student to imitate those models with their own compositions.
In this strategy you need to be familiar with some of the sentence structures I outlined in The Art of the Sentence. These are the participle, action verbs, and the absolute. If you are not familiar with this, the link above will open in a new tab and you can download the slide decks for those concepts.
When we say to kids “show” don’t “tell”, often we are asking them to write in such a way so the reader needs to infer something about the setting or character.
Crafting inferences
These are the model sentences used in the slide deck, pulled from a range of novels:
Participles
Pinching his nose, Harry drank the potion down in two large gulps.
“Hello,” said Ben, squeezing his bottom lip.
The camera crews, perched like buzzards on rooftops, only add to the effect.
Verbs
Lockie cooked inside.
The father glared at his daughter with deep suspicion, but said nothing.
The man strode along the platform
Rain-rotten shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away.
The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard.
Absolutes
Ben stood, walked quietly out of his bedroom and tiptoed up the hall, heart keeping time with his footsteps.
Radley had been leaning against the wall when I came into the room, his arms folded across his chest.
Fingers trembling slightly, he opened the white envelope.
Using a few targeted sentence structures and models is a powerful way to get kids to notice how writers make us infer detail about the text, and how it can transform how a student writes.
In the very first example, a typical student composition would be:
Harry drank the foul smelling and tasting potion in two large gulps.
They have gone into tell mode. JK Rowling, however, includes the participle phrase at the beginning of the sentence.
Pinching his nose, Harry drank the potion down in two large gulps
Harry Potter
JK Rowling makes us infer something about this potion; it’s smell by the visual detail conveyed by the participle phrase ‘pinching his nose’.
We can get students to learn how to craft an inference by imitating the style and structure of this sentence.
For example:
Scratching his head, John looked at the examination paper.
Imitation
If you have taught these structures already, you have the opportunity to reinforce the grammatical element. It’s the authentic way of teaching grammar in context. If you have taught a kid to use the participle phrase in their writing, it is likely that they are starting to write some examples where the reader needs to infer meaning. This opens up opportunities to discuss inference on a daily basis using any text.
Look through the slide deck below to see how the other sentences can be used to support students to identify inference but also create their own in sentences.
And if you really want, drop me a comment below to motivate me to keep sharing resources. In a future post I’ll show how to authentically teach grammar in context.
I unearthed this prereading strategy in a journal paper on evidence based practices. The strategy was shown to improve student reading comprehension in both Primary and Secondary students.
The strategy is simple; you provide a list of words from the story/article in a vertical column and students make a prediction about the text. The screenshot below from What Works in Secondary Writing (p.35) outlines the process.
I love this strategy because of how easy and effective it is in the classroom. It is a predicting activity which develops vocabulary and gets students writing, providing me with a short text to look at the basic mechanics of what they are doing, and is a stimulus for students to articulate their thinking in a class discussion. Best of all, the evidence suggests that it works to improve student comprehension. It’s a win on all fronts!
The quote below is from a study of using Story Impression with High School Students.
SI [Story Impression] method is effective because it prompts readers to engage in several processes important to reading comprehension rather than focusing on a single process such as making predictions or the activation of prior knowledge.
So, I really like this simple activity and it is one of my go to prereading tasks. Below is a sample from Roald Dahl’s Matilda. All of the resources I have developed (you can get them from the resource page) have a prebuilt story impression task
Story Impression sample
[EDIT 9.50PM – If someone reads this far, here is my offer. Go to the resource page and comment on a novel you’d like a resource for and I’ll make one for you.]
[EDIT 7.06AM – I’ve got three extra requests so I’ll have to end the offer above. Feel free to pop on over though and see what else is coming]
I’m conscious that readers want to get to the point and not hear about my Damascus road conversion. So in this post I’ll:
outline some basic ideas and provide you with explicit teaching slide decks to download.
link you to Harry Noden’s Image Grammar where you can learn more about the brushtrokes mentioned below. Every Secondary English teacher should have a copy of Noden; I think it should be used in University Education method.
point to other outstanding resources by by Don Killagon and Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined, which contain some similar ideas.
The sentence structures and slides below will be useful for the teaching resources, if you wish to use them.
These tools are used here in the context of narrative writing, however the sentence structures are applicable to persuasive. The participle phrase concept is used in Seldon Bubble theory
Brushstrokes to improve writing
Harry Noden calls writing a type of painting, and various sentences are like brushstrokes. He has 5 main brushstrokes which are explicitly taught: the participle, appositive, absolute, action verbs, and delayed adjectives. Jeff Anderson in Mechanically Inclined extends this idea to any sentence form. The slide decks below are things I have put together, inspired by Noden, Anderson and Killagon. Use them and adapt as you see fit.
On this page you will find 9 slide decks to support you and your students. These are:
The participle
The appositive
The absolute
Action verbs
Delayed adjectives
Subordinating conjunctions/adverbial clauses
Coordinating conjunctions
Adjectival/Relative clauses
Extending simple sentences
The participle
This is an excellent tool to teach students. The first few slides contain some teacher notes, and the later slides contain some extended concepts. Remember, this has not been designed as a single lesson, but a resource to pull ideas and activities from. This simple tool will make instantly make changes to your student’s writing.
Another great tool from Noden is the appositive. Essentially it is a noun phrase which renames an earlier noun. Noden describes this process of extending visual detail with these brushstrokes as zooming in on an image. This structure is used across all KLAs
The absolute phrases combines a noun and a participle. There are other versions, but this is enough to get you started. Noden and Killagon provide a simple trick for creating absolute phrases; remove the verb ‘to be’ and you probably have created an absolute phrase.
Noden’s section on Action verbs is brief, yet comprehensive. Poor writers often lurch for adjectives and adverbs rather than the finding a specific verb. This is an excellent tool to teach students and is great as a simple editing tool.
Noden uses delayed adjectives as a simple way to teach style. I don’t have a ppt for this because the concept is so simple. By way of illustration look at how this sentence is improved with when the adjectives occur after the noun:
1. A drunk guy staggers into my field, red-eyed and swearing.
2. Senora Wong, diminuative but not fragile, ruled with an iron fist.
3.Words were exchanged, brief and hushed.
4. Nausea began to spread through his stomach, warm and oozy and evil.
Each one of the sentences above could have the adjectives or adjective phrase placed before the noun, but the rhythm would no be as nice. Consider: Brief and hushed words were exchanged.
So, teach writers to think about delaying the adjectives to after the noun it describes.
Adjectival/Relative clauses
Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined has some excellent instructions around the adjectival phrase or relative clause. For struggling writers, this gives them another tool to expand the visual detail of their sentences.
The mnemonic I use for this is taken from Jeff Anderson. You don’t have to use AAAWWUBBIS (a-whoo-bis); it is the one stuck in my head. AAAWWUBBIS is a list of the common subordinators: After, Although, As, When, While, Until, Before, Because, If Since
At NAPLAN marking training they use a different one (A WHITE BUS), which has a couple less.
Improving student literacy 