The Powerful Impact of Sentence-Level Work

You’re listening to episode number 226 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

How many of you feel like your students are behind in writing? I know it’s been a couple of months since the school year started. You probably have a pretty good idea as far as what your students writing abilities are. And if I had to guess, I would bet most of you raised your hand or nodded your head yes, saying you do feel like your students are behind in writing.

And that’s my guess, because when I was in the classroom as a fourth-grade teacher, I was very concerned about the quality of my student’s writing. I had several students who could not write a short, simple sentence, their writing was almost indecipherable. Anytime I had them write a paragraph or an essay, it was really difficult to try to extract any sort of meaning from their writing. But I also had students who were masters of the run-on sentence. They would write an entire paragraph or page, and there was only one period at the end, and they had lots of ands. I would get sentences that were something like: I want to be a vet when I grow up because vets take care of animals, and they help animals, and they get to play with animals, and they… and they… and they… and they… and they don’t know how to end their sentence.

I also had students who knew how to write a simple sentence, but they didn’t know how to add detail or vary their sentence structure. So when they were writing, there was a lot of repetition in their ideas because they really didn’t know what else to write, and a lot of their sentences started with the same subject and predicate. I would get a lot of sentences that looked like: Dogs make great pets. Dogs are fun to play with. Dogs are nice. Dogs are the best pet. I like dogs. Dogs are great.

I’m sure you can identify some of your students sort of match those writing examples, but all of these students of mine needed help improving their sentence writing skills, yet I did not make it a priority. And when I look back and think about my time in the classroom, this is an area that I wish I could go back and redo, and when I think about it, there were a few reasons why I didn’t focus on sentence writing as a fourth-grade teacher, and I’m curious if any of these are reasons why maybe you’re not focusing on sentence writing in your classroom.

I think the first and sort of the main reason was that I felt the pressure of end-of-year testing. Anybody else feel that pressure? When I was a classroom teacher in Texas, my students had to write two five-paragraph essays, an expository and a narrative, and that stressed me out. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to go back to the basics and focus on sentence writing, because we had to figure out how to write essays. I thought, my students are not going to be assessed on their sentence writing at the end of the year. It’s their essay writing. I wrongly assumed that if I did focus on essay writing, that my students would eventually figure out how to write sentences. That’s completely wrong.

The second reason why I think I didn’t really focus on sentence writing in my fourth-grade classroom is I didn’t know how to support students in fourth grade who didn’t know how to write sentences. Anybody else feel that struggle? I felt like sentence writing was a remedial skill and I didn’t have any good strategies or tools to help my fourth graders improve their sentence writing. So I didn’t know what to do that felt on grade level, that felt purposeful. I didn’t know how to support them. And when I think about it, I’ve talked on this podcast before about our sentence writing routine and different sentence writing activities that you can do with your students to help improve their sentence writing and I wish that I had access to that when I was in the classroom. Our sentence-writing routine is filled with activities that will help students improve their sentence writing skills. And if you are not using this routine in your classroom or have not started yet, do it this week. Seriously, it is going to change the way your students write sentences, which is going to have a huge impact on so many other things. And you can grab a free sample of our routine at stellarteacher.com/sentences.

I think the third reason why I didn’t focus on sentence writing practice with my students is that I didn’t really understand just how important sentences were to my students literacy success. And maybe that’s you. Maybe you have heard me talk about sentences before. You know it’s important, but maybe you just aren’t aware of how critical sentence writing is to your students literacy success. You know that it’s there, but it’s not something that you are prioritizing every day. So my goal with this episode is to really help you understand that sentence writing really does need to be a top-priority skill for you and your students. Really, when we think about it. It’s something that we can’t afford not to focus on in our classroom. And I hope that by the end of this episode, you understand why the time that you spend focusing on sentence level work is going to be one of the best uses of your instructional time, and hopefully you also get some practical strategies that will help you prioritize sentence level work in your classroom.

So let’s talk about it. Why do we need to prioritize sentence level writing in our upper elementary classrooms? The first reason is that sentences are the foundation of all writing. Building a strong foundation in sentence writing is ultimately like setting up the base or foundation for any building structure. Ultimately, without sentence writing, more complex writing, is going to be unsteady and will probably fail, and that’s because sentences are at the heart of all writing. If a student cannot write a decent sentence, then there is very little hope that they will ever be able to write a decent paragraph or anything longer. So for those of you that feel like you just don’t have time to work on sentences because you have to work on essay development, just remember that unless your students know how to write strong sentences, then all your time, energy and work on that essay writing is really going to go to waste. Now, when you focus on sentence level writing, you are going to be giving your students the tools that will help them articulate their thoughts clearly, which is essential, obviously, for sentence writing, but it’s also essential for paragraph writing, essay writing, and like I said, any other writing that they’re doing. Having strong sentence writing skills really does allow students to develop the skills for organizing their thoughts into coherent, connected ideas, which ultimately will improve the quality and clarity of their overall writing. It’s essential.

Now, one of the things that is discussed in The Writing Revolution is how cognitively demanding writing is, and if you think about it, it is really one of the most challenging things we ask our students to do. And that’s because in order to be a successful writer, students have to hold a lot of things in their working memory. Things like word choice. What words are they going to use? How do they spell those words? Are they using those words correctly? What tense of words do they want to use? Past tense, future tense, present tense? They have to think about planning and organization. What details are they going to share? What order are they going to share them in? What structure do they want to give their writing? Those are just some of the things. And if a student struggles to write basic sentences, then they’re going to have less brain power to attend to the other aspects of writing. So we want to make sentence writing as automatic as possible for our students, so that way they have the brain power to dedicate to the other demands of writing.

In addition, being able to write a complete sentence should not be the benchmark that we’re working towards in upper elementary. So many teachers will say, my students can’t write a complete sentence. Now, obviously we want to help them overcome that challenge, but ultimately, what we really want for our upper elementary students is to know how to competently and automatically write using a variety of sentence structures. So we want our students to be able to write complex sentences that begin with a subordinating conjunction. So your students should be able to produce sentences like, although it was raining, we decided to play outside, or because she studied hard, Maria passed her test with flying colors. We also want our students to be able to write simple sentences with different phrases, like appositives. So we want our students to be able to produce sentences like my dog, a playful golden retriever, loves to chase squirrels. Or Mr. Thompson, our school principal, gave an inspiring speech. But we also want them to be able to write long, compound sentences. So again, we want our students to automatically be able to produce sentences like the students finished their project on time, and they celebrated their hard work with a small party in class, or Sarah practiced her violin every day, but she still felt nervous before her recital.

I want you to take a minute, and I want you to think about how your students writing would change if they had the ability to produce sentences like the ones I just shared with you. And here’s the thing that we have to keep in mind. In order for our students to get there, we must provide explicit sentence writing instruction, and we must give them plenty of practice. They’re not going to be able to produce sentences like this if we are focusing on essay development, because essay development focuses on brainstorming, ideas organization, figuring out what details you’re going to include, coming up with thesis statements. We need to make sure that we’re spending time focusing on sentence level work in our classroom. Now a really practical way to do this is with our sentence writing routine. So if you are already using this routine, give yourself a little pat on the back. You are well on your way to helping your students improve their sentence writing skills. Our weekly routine has five sentence writing activities that will help your students learn how to expand their sentences, how to fix fragments, how to combine sentences. You can download a free sample at stellarteacher.com/sentences you can also get our year-long routine inside the Stellar Literacy Collective, or on Teachers Pay Teachers, and we will link to both of those in the show notes, in case you are ready to make this routine a regular part of your classroom for the entire year.

Now let’s talk about the second reason why we must prioritize sentence writing in our classroom, and that reason is sentence writing is going to improve comprehension. Yep, focusing on sentence writing is going to improve your sentence writing, and we often think about sentence writing only in terms of writing instruction, but sentence writing is also going to improve your student’s reading comprehension. And one of my favorite quotes from The Reading Comprehension Blueprint by Nancy Hennessy is comprehension begins at the sentence level. I think that just makes so much sense, right? Understanding individual sentences is the first step in being able to comprehend an entire passage. So if your students cannot break apart and comprehend sentences, then they are going to struggle to make sense of more extended texts. And having really strong sentence comprehension is especially important in upper elementary because as texts become more complex. Students are going to encounter complex sentences, simple sentences with appositives or other phrases, and compound sentences. And if students don’t understand how these sentences are formed or what goes into these sentences, then they’re going to have a really hard time extracting the main idea. The goal of any sentence is for students to understand the who and the do. Who, or what is the sentence about? And what are they doing? So students really have to understand sentence structure of these longer, complex sentences in order to comprehend them in the text that they’re reading. So we’re thinking about sentence writing, not necessarily from a production standpoint, but from students internalizing the sentences and extracting meaning from them. Ultimately, you can help your students better understand what is happening in the sentence and why the author included that sentence in the text, and this really is crucial for students ability to read, understand nuances in a text, make inferences, and really interpret the significance of sentence level details and the author’s purpose for writing the text. So it’s very important for comprehension, that students understand sentence structure.

If we want to think about a practical application, how can we improve this for our students? One thing that you can do is incorporate sentence deconstruction into your read-alouds or your small group instruction. And this is something that we’ve added into our whole group lessons inside the Stellar Literacy Collective, because we know that it is so incredibly important, and it’s also something that I think is difficult for teachers to think about. I know I never did this when I was in the classroom. I wish that I had this information and these tools so I could go back and do it again. But ultimately, what sentence deconstruction can look like is finding a key sentence in a text that you are reading and then breaking it apart or highlighting an important syntactic element. So you’re really analyzing a sentence from a comprehension standpoint.

So maybe you identify the parts of speech in a sentence, and you talk about the role or the function of those specific words. Are they answering the question? Who are they answering the question? What are they answering the question? When? So really breaking apart the specific words and the jobs that they’re playing in the sentence, maybe you’re identifying the conjunctions in a sentence, and you explain how they connect ideas. The conjunction and is going to connect ideas in a different way than the conjunction yet, or because so making sure students understand how the conjunctions connect ideas together, and how that impacts our understanding. Maybe you identify an appositive in a sentence, and you explain how it gives more information about the noun. Maybe you remove unnecessary adjectives or adverbs, so all that is left are the head noun and the head verb to make it really easy for students to understand what the sentence is about. Ultimately, there are so many ways to deconstruct a sentence, but this regular practice is going to help your students understand sentence structure and really think critically about the sentences the author included.

Now the third reason why we need to prioritize sentence writing in our classroom is that understanding sentence structure is necessary for students to read fluently. Now, fluent reading is not just about reading speed or reading quickly. It’s about reading with correct expression and phrasing, and really reading for comprehension. Now phrasing is such an important part of being able to read fluently, and this means that students must be able to recognize different sentence structures so that they know where to parse sentences correctly, which is really just going to make their reading smoother and more meaningful.

I had a realization this summer when I was reading, Shifting The Balance with our summer book study, and they were sharing different fluency strategies. One of the strategies that they shared was for students to practice scooping phrases, so as they’re reading, they’re identifying phrases ( words that go together), and they practice reading those groups of words as a phrase, and you draw a line under them, and you scoop them. So it’s really easy for students to understand these words all go together. However I realized that in order for students to be able to scoop phrases, they need to know what a phrase is and how to identify it. They need to know a noun phrase and a verb phrase and a prepositional phrase and how to identify those. Which means they have to have a strong understanding of sentence structure. Ultimately, when students know how to identify and understand sentence components, things like subjects, predicates, phrases, clauses, then they’re able to read with better pacing, intonation, and expression, which will lead to better comprehension. And all of these skills really support a students ability to process the sentences in real-time, which, again, is also essential for fluent, expressive reading.

Areally practical way that you can bring this into your classroom is simply to bring awareness to students on how to read sentences correctly. A lot of times when we’re practicing fluency, we practice it with an entire passage. You can also practice fluently reading a sentence. You can practice building sentences so you’re going to read the sentence just with the noun and the verb, and as you add more details to it, your fluency and expression might change, right? So understanding that if we have a sentence within an appositive, we’re going to add some pauses before and after the appositive. If we have a sentence that begins with a dependent clause at the beginning or a subordinating conjunction, we’re going to read that phrase first and have a pause before we read the independent clause of the sentence. So ultimately, just spend time practicing reading these sentences with fluency so students understand how certain phrases can be read with correct pausing and expression. An easy thing you can do is if you are using our sentence writing routine as your students are writing sentences. Practice reading them with fluency. So practice reading them again and again and making sure that they’re reading with correct expression, and pausing and understanding how to read the phrases together so it sounds natural.

Now, the last reason why you need to prioritize sentence level writing is because having strong syntactic awareness will boost your students competence. Syntactic awareness simply means that your students have an understanding of how sentence structure works, which is what we want to have happen as a result of our writing instruction.

So as you can see from the examples that I shared, sentence writing shows up. In so many aspects of literacy. We see it in reading, we see it in writing, we see it in comprehension. We see it in fluency. And your students are going to feel empowered when they can craft sentences accurately, which will give them a strong sense of accomplishment. But also we know that if students know how to construct and interpret sentences competently, then they’re more likely to participate in class discussions. They’re more likely to tackle longer writing assignments. They’re more likely to engage in challenging texts, because they have the tools to write and read and understand what they are reading. I really do think that having strong syntactic awareness gives students competence that can transform their relationship to literacy as a whole. And this is one of the things that I think is necessary for students to be able to see themselves as capable readers and writers.

So hopefully, as you can see from this episode, you recognize that you don’t have time not to focus on sentence level writing in your classroom. It really is something that is so important, and it really will transform your students into skilled readers and writers.

Remember, if you want to grab our free sentence writing routine, go to stellarteacher.com/sentences. It is one of the easiest ways to prioritize sentence level work in your classroom, and after just a few weeks, you’re going to notice your student’s sentence writing skills and knowledge will start to improve. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you have a stellar week, and I will see you back here next Monday.

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Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany, and you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com. I’ll see you back here next week.