Teach Writing: 5 Ways to Utilize Time Outside of Your ELA Block for Sentence Writing

If I asked you how you feel about teaching writing, what would your response be? I recently read an article about a group of 500 teachers, 3rd through 8th grade, who were surveyed about their thoughts on teaching writing. Only 55 percent of them said they enjoyed teaching writing.

And the main reasons for not liking teaching writing included a lack of time, resources, and knowledge. If you can relate, I hope you will find some encouragement and ideas from this blog post today! 

Finding intentional ways to teach writing can be difficult. When I was in the classroom, I found myself trying to teach writing in silos. I would teach a grammar lesson in isolation and then a sentence structure lesson the following week and then would try to jump into writing an essay. And this didn’t work well for my students or me. 

Even if you don’t love teaching writing, I encourage you start thinking of yourself as a writing teacher – no matter what subject(s) you teach! Students must have proficient writing skills and an understanding of syntax to be successful in every other subject area. And as teachers it is our responsibility to help them build a solid writing foundation.

But you are reading this for a reason; you are looking for ways to add meaningful writing instruction into your schedule! The good news is with a little bit of intention, you can easily add in high-impact writing activities to any subject you teach. 

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to listen to Episode #101: A Literacy Routine For Building Students’ Sentence Structure Skills to help you learn more about implementing high-impact sentence writing routines in your classroom. 

Also, check out my blog post, Five Highly Effective Sentence Writing Activities, to help you better understand five quick, effective routines that will help your students build confidence in their writing skills. 

Simple, Yet Effective Activities to Teach Writing

Today I want to give you five simple, yet effective activities to teach writing that you can implement in any subject you teach. These activities can be easily adjusted for math, science, social studies, art, or even music! Because let’s be honest, our students need to be proficient in writing no matter what subject they are learning.

Build-A-Sentence Routine 

Brief Explanation of the Routine:

• Students look at an image. 
• They answer SOME of the 5W+H questions about the image using words or phrases. 
• Then they combine the words and phrases to build a sentence about the image.

Ideas for Implementing: 

• Show your students a content related image or video.
• Students will use the 5W+How question stems to answer basic questions about the image/video. 
• Students combine their answers to the questions into a sentence. 

Let’s say you show your students a diagram of the life cycle of a chicken. An example of how students would use the questions and their answer to write a sentence might be: 

Sentence: To keep her eggs warm, a hen will sit on the eggs in her nest for 21 days. 

You can also take the activity a step further and have students go back and revise their answer to be more specific and include more details.

Writing a Variety of Sentences 

Brief Explanation of the Routine:

• Students look at an image. 
• They will write four different types of sentences based on the images. 
• They will write a statement, question, command, and exclamation. 

Ideas for Implementing: 

• Use the activity as an Exit Ticket at the end of a lesson.
• Ask students to write 2-4 different types of sentences based on what they have learned or an image/video from the lesson.

Let’s say you taught a math lesson on perimeter. For an Exit Ticket, you could have your students write various sentences. Example student responses might include: 

• Question: How do you find the perimeter of a rectangle? 
• Statement: The perimeter is the distance around a two-dimensional shape. 
• Command: Add the length of each side to find the perimeter of a rectangle. 

Find and Fix Fragments 

Brief Explanation of the Routine:

• Give students 3 or more example sentences.
• The sentences are based on the content/lesson or could even be pulled from a mentor text 
• Make one of the example sentences a fragment.
• Students must identify the fragment and rewrite it as a complete sentence.

Let’s say you are working on a lesson on the branches of government. You could give your students the sentence fragment The judicial branch – and then ask them to write several sentences completing the fragment. Example student responses might include: 

• The judicial branch is one of three branches of the U.S. government. 
• The judicial branch is in charge of deciding the meaning of the laws. 
• There are different levels of courts within the judicial branch.  

Notice 2 of the 3 sentences use the fragment at the beginning, and the last example uses the fragment at the end. This activity is great for conversing with your students about different types of sentences and how you can complete a fragment in various ways. 

Combining Sentences 

Brief Explanation of the Routine:

• Give students 2-3 simple sentences. 
• The goal is to combine the single sentences into one sentence.
• Students will have to write complex or compound sentences.

Let’s say you are teaching a science lesson on bats. As an end-of-lesson activity, have your students write down what they have learned in two simple sentences, then combine them into a single (complex or compound) sentence. 

Student examples might look like: 

• Tricolored bats are endangered species. 
• Tricolored bats are impacted by a deadly disease called white-nose syndrome. 

Combined Sentence: Because of a deadly white-nose syndrome disease, tricolored bats are endangered. 

Scrambled Sentences 

Brief Explanation of the Routine:

• Give students a scrambled sentence.
• Students must unscramble the words and reorder them to form a complete sentence.

Let’s say you are teaching a social studies lesson on Western Expansion. Have students write a sentence detailing something they learned during the lesson. Students will cut up their sentence strips and switch with a classmate. Then, they must unscramble the sentence to make it complete. 

• This activity would make a great station (center) for any subject! 
• This activity would also be a great warm-up activity for future lessons. 

I hope you find these sentence writing activities valuable and easy to implement in your preexisting lessons! They are so flexible and can be used for any subject. 

If you want to see these activities in a fully-developed resource, you’ll want to check out my Sentence Writing Routine Freebie. 

Put It Into Practice: 

1. Pick one of these sentence writing activities and include it in one of your lessons this week. I encourage you to try it outside of your ELA block! 
2. Check out podcast Episode #101: A Literacy Routine For Building Students’ Sentence Structure Skills skills to learn more about this new high-impact literacy for sentence writing. 
3. Join us inside The Stellar Literacy Collective, where you will get access to a resource library filled with reading resources, including the 40-Week Sentence Structure resource mentioned in this post. 

Happy Teaching!