Super Sentence Writing

The sentence is the backbone to wonderful stories, essays, reports... you name it!   Lesson #1 started with  a boring base sentence, "The sun shines."   We started our lesson with placing adjectives and adverbs in our sentence, which added a lot of necessary description.  After a lesson on adjectival and adverbial clauses and phrases, as well as experimenting with starting sentences with "Because" (Yes, you can, if you follow the rules!), we created fabulous sentences that painted beautiful summer scenes.  For fun, we added an element of art, writing our sentence on a sun with a lovely blue sky background.  Here are just a few fabulous examples!

Annika (4th grade) wrote a beautiful sentence with many vivid descriptive words.  I love how her adverb ends the sentence.  Her classmates helped her fine tune it until she decided on her best option.  We did a lot of peer helping this day, giving advice on what we thought sounded best as each student read their ideas. 

In the prickly field, the laughing children plant vegetables while the wonderful, amazing sun shines brightly.


Here is Arushi's (5th grade).  I love the picture that this sentence creates in my mind.  (And Arushi's nice artwork definitely goes along with it very well!)

"On a breezy summer day, the hot vibrant sun shines brightly on all of the dogs splashing in the bright blue swimming pool."


As I mentioned, I taught the students how to start with "Because "and still avoid sentence fragments.  Many of them like doing it so much, that I am now seeing this very mature style of writing in their other assignments.  Here are two beautiful examples of what the students learned.  Here is George's (4th grade) fabulous sentence:

"Because it is hot and big, the bright yellow sun shines warmly in the middle of September in the nice blue sky."


Here is Jacqueline's (3rd grade).  Again, she starts with "Because" beautifully, and has some super art work to match!

"Because the angry animals are cold, the jolly red sun shines brightly so the animals can lie in the sun."


Next we move on to..... PARAGRAPHS!