[mein10]

Post your favorite strategies or lesson for teaching SENTENCE FLUENCY. Include books, lessons, and hints!

[icare]

First on an overhead whole class, then with partners, and finally individually I give students text I've copied from various books. They use highlighters to identify sentences that begin interestingly. I also show them examples of pieces where all the sentence begin the same.

We also take sample sentences and write them 3 different ways to show the differences.
I'd love to have some more ideas!

[mein10]

ICARE: I am going to try it this week!!! Thanks!

[Mrs.3rdGrade]

There's a book Poems for Two Voices that was great for the sentence fluency trait. It was suggested in one of the 6 + 1 Traits books by Culham. The students paired up and practiced reading the poems that are written for two people to read together. Some lines are read by one or the other and some are read together. It gives them an understanding of how writing has rhythm and flow. They needed to identify the rhythm, tempo, candence, etc. in order to read with their partner. They loved it!

Another lesson...Identify the various types of sentence beginnings like verbs, adjectives, common words, participial phrases, interjections, etc. and color code them on chart paper. Have students analyze two pieces of writing (a ineffective and effective sentence fluency). Have students underline the sentences using the color code key. The students can see how effective sentence fluency includes the use of a variety of sentence beginnings. The ineffective example is shown as being boring with only a couple of colors. They can also see how this ineffective example is "choppy" and not fluid when they read it since most of the sentences begin with a common word.