Trait Trackers include 20 popular picture books dissected for K-12 writing skills. Each tracker identifies specific writing skills you can teach and the mentor text excerpts to reference in the mini-lesson.

DEFINE A SENTENCE.

A sentence has a subject and a verb and is a complete thought. Teach students to strip any sentence down to its core— the subject & verb. Then play Jeff Anderson’s (Mechanically Inclined) “Sentence Smackdown.”

• Access a playing board template.
• Check out student examples from Jeff’s classroom.

TWO-WORD SENTENCE SEARCH.

As a follow-up to Smackdown, collect two-word sentences from reading—a subject and a verb. Here are some examples found in various literature. NOTE: Exclude dialogue from the hunt, but don’t limit your search to literature/fiction.

• Look for two-word sentences in opinion/argumentative writing and all genres of informative text.
• Encourage students to look for examples in authentic text they come across in their everyday world (e.g., CD covers, restaurant placemats, greeting cards, etc.).

COMMA WOES.

Although students learned what a sentence was in the primary grades, as they get older, they tend to regress. Jeff Anderson attributes this to the fact that their writing skills aren’t keeping up with their growing ability to express more complex thoughts. This explains why so many write run-on sentences. And for those trying to utilize the comma, they often misuse it.

• 20 Applications of the comma.
• Hip Hop Hippity Hop (First grader writing where student uses periods instead of commas.)

CONVENTIONS CHARACTERS.

Once students know of the end marks (and/or other inner-sentence punctuation), you could review each mark’s function and purpose in a sentence. More than simply the “rule,” students need to understand the different applications of the mark and how it impacts the sentence’s meaning and reading fluency. After assigning a punctuation mark to each first grader in her class, Melody Wolff (Homan Elementary in Schererville, IN) had students turn the marks into super heroes. Here is Period Girl.

DICTATION APPS & WEBSITES.

Students can review punctuation marks with dictated sentences using a variety of apps. There is a lot of technology that will spell check dictated sentences, but students have to add their own punctuation marks.

• Students speak into the dictation app/website and then go back and add in the correct punctuation.
• Students speak sentences and the punctuation marks necessary within each facet of the sentence. This is the same concept as the “Speaking Punctuation” activity.
• Merge these dictation apps into your first-draft writing experiences. Whether students are writing about their reading or drafting responses to end-of-chapter questions—you could have them speak their sentences and include/edit the punctuation.
• Favorite apps and websites for the strategies listed above include:

Evernote App
(Home Overview)

Voice Assistant
(Tutorial)

Dragon
(Tutorial)

COMPOUND SENTENCES.

When merging two ideas (sentences) together, be sure your instruction goes beyond how to mechanically do it.

• Students need direction on which two sentences to combine. They should be related somehow.
• When displaying the list of common conjunctions, do so with a comma attached. This way they see the conjunction and its comma every time!

COMPOUND SENTENCES.

As readers we need sentence lengths to vary. Without it, writing expert Ralph Fletcher says the writing is a “mind-numbing sameness.” When sentences are all approximately the same length, it dulls the reader’s senses.

• Assess the degree of variety in a piece by Charting the Fluency.
• You might also compare this to the Slinky Test. We want to have short sentences (compressed Slinky) and long sentences (stretched Slinky) in the same writing. Show students ways to take a short sentence and stretch it and how to revise a long sentence to be shorter.
• Since most often students write short sentences, give them practice stretching their Slinky Tests. (This is also an opportunity to work on compound and complex sentences.)

REPRESENT THE NATURAL FLUENCY OF SPOKEN WORDS.

When writing character dialogue, it’s more sophisticated to create stilted, fragmented, and broken sentence structure. This is natural and thus fluent.

• Check out this excerpt from Wonder.
• Provide students a typed up conversation (with all complete sentences and formal conventions). Based on the content (e.g., conversation between two burglars) of the message, provide a context (e.g., while inside a house, they hear the owners coming in the front door). Based on this information, challenge students to rewrite the conversation using more natural sentence fluency. TIP: While students are revising, encourage them to read aloud their sentences to listen to the fluency. Remember, sentence fluency is an auditory trait.
• Young writers can play with spoken words in speech bubbles using this single frame or 4-framed template. The speech/dialogue can abandon the formal and traditional sentence structure they use in sentences below their pictures.

SENTENCE LENGTH IMPACTS THE MESSAGE.

Be intentional about where to place the long and short sentences within expository writing.

• A good guide is to use longer sentences for topics sentences and concluding statements. Save shorter sentences for the supporting details within the middle of paragraphs.
• Here is an example using the informative text from Bat Loves the Night.

SHORT DECLARATIVE SENTENCES.

Add impact with a short sentence in persuasive writing. Now this is only effective if the short sentence is among medium and long sentences. Check out some of these examples.