Friday, February 27, 2015

Spectacular Snowflake Sentences

All of my writing classes, no matter what age or ability level, participate in a very detailed sentence writing assignment.  This introduces (or reviews) important grammar concepts and parts of speech, and how the knowledge and understanding of those elements makes our writing more vivid and interesting.  The students start off with a base sentence (simple noun-verb):
The snowflake falls.

From there, the beginning writers add adjectives, adverbs, and phrases as they are ready.  The older students learn the difference between phrases and clauses, and how to use them to tell "where" and "when."  They also learn the correct way to begin a sentence with "Because."   Before writing their final copy, they peer edit to discover where the clauses and phrases sound best.

Enjoy these samples across the grades!
The cold blue snowflake falls on the last day of winter.
~Tyler, Kindergarten
























The huge blue snowflake falls on the big tree at 2:00 in the middle of the night.
~Jacob, 1st grade


The blue and sparkly snowflake falls into the chimney in the middle of the night.
~Chloe, 2nd grade


Because it's a winter day, a beautiful snowflake falls out of the sky.
~Nicole, 3rd grade









 When the sun rose to the center of the sky, the melting and shimmering snowflake carefully fell onto the white mountains.
~Lucy, 4th grade


From the blue, purple sky, a delicate glowing snowflake slowly falls onto a cold, abandoned farm.
~Jerry, 5th grade