how-to write a sentence

Following our extended (and ongoing) work telling, planning, and representing true stories, the children have been learning about and writing sentences. We have talked about what makes writing easy to read and what is important to remember when writing a sentence. This teaching has supported children at different places, for the child writing words, it is important for them to ensure they have spaces between the words. For the child writing lengthy sentences, we've talked about punctuation at the end and how to decide what kind of punctuation to use.

Some of the developing writers are applying these skills and their growing knowledge independently during our writing workshop. For other writers, they are working on using all that they know to stretch out and write words. As I read their writing, it is always amazing how a community writers can be so diverse.

As part of our sentence work, we built sentences this week. Using a sentence strip we pointed to and read the words, cut out the words, organized the words, and reread the sentence checking for accuracy. This work provides another way for the children to demonstrate their learning. The writers had to follow the directions, point and read the sentence strip before cutting and building, recognize new and familiar sight words, recognize words in the at family and words that rhyme, carefully cut out words without cutting off any letters, reread their sentence, and use an illustration to represent their sentence. Some of the writers chose the challenge; a mixed up sentence that they had to organize on their own!

Building sentences is now a new choice during Academic Choice, ensuring children have opportunities to show what they know about conventional writing in a variety of ways- writers and literary artists can write sentences and BUILD sentences!

Sentences have. . .

An uppercase letter at the beginning.
Punctuation at the end.
Spaces between words!