How to Strengthen Student Writing—One Sentence at a Time

Hey friend, welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad you’re here for the second episode in our special summer writing series. This summer, we are doing a four-week podcast series inspired by The Writing Revolution 2.0, which happens to be the book we’re reading together during our summer book study.

Last week, we talked about some of the signs that might indicate it’s time to rethink your writing instruction. So if you missed that episode, go back and listen to episode number 256, Five Signs You Might Need to Rethink Your Writing Instruction.

Today, we’re going to zoom in on arguably one of the most important aspects of writing—and that is sentences. So if you feel like your students can’t write good paragraphs or essays, I promise you are not alone. And here’s the thing—when we slow down and spend time on sentence-level work, everything else in writing gets easier.

Today during our episode, I’m going to talk about why sentences matter so much. I’m going to share a few quick activities you can start using right away that will really impact your students’ writing growth, and we’ll talk about how sentence-level work can fit into what you’re already doing.

Sounds good? Let’s go ahead and dive in.

So let’s start with why focusing on sentences is so important in your upper elementary classroom. Here’s what I see and hear so often: teachers, especially in upper elementary, skip over sentence-level practice. And if I’m being honest, I did the same thing when I was in the classroom. It’s something that I think we feel like students should already know when they enter our upper elementary classrooms, right? It’s like, okay, they should have learned how to write a complete sentence in kindergarten, first grade, second grade—like, why are we focusing on that?

But here’s the truth—even if students can write a basic sentence, there’s so much more to learn about sentence writing. If anything, I think we need to rethink what we consider sentence-level practice. It’s not just helping our students write complete sentences; it’s helping them write clear, interesting, detailed sentences. Because sentences are the building blocks for all other writing. If we ever want our students to be able to write strong paragraphs or essays, it starts with helping them write strong sentences.

In The Writing Revolution, they put it perfectly. They say that the importance of spending plenty of instructional time working with sentences can’t be stressed enough. Sentence-level work is the engine that propels writing forward. And I love that quote because it’s so true. Strong sentences are the foundation for everything else we want our students to do as writers.

It’s really important for us to recognize that students won’t automatically pick up how to write strong, complex sentences just by reading. I think sometimes there’s this misconception that if we just give our students more opportunities to practice writing, they’ll become better at writing. But written language is so much more precise and complex than spoken language, which means we really need to teach it explicitly.

That means we need to directly teach, explain, and show our students a variety of sentence writing skills—things like how to fix a fragment and how to correct a run-on sentence. We need to show them how to write a complex sentence and explain where the subordinating conjunction goes. We need to show them how to add an appositive to a sentence so they can give more information about the subject. And we need to show them how to use different types of conjunctions to connect ideas.

It’s really important for us to expand our understanding and thinking of sentence-level work so we realize how valuable it can be to our students. Because when we realize how valuable it is, we will, for sure, prioritize it in our instruction.

Okay, so hopefully at this point, we’re all on the same page, and we can agree that sentence-level writing is so important. It’s something we should prioritize, especially in our upper elementary classrooms. So let’s talk about a few quick ways that we can help our students boost their sentence writing skills.

Now, if you’ve read The Writing Revolution 2.0, then you know that book is filled with so many really great strategies and ideas. If you don’t have a copy, I would highly recommend ordering it. These are some of the activities that they bring up in the book.

Now, the great thing about these activities is that they’re short, they’re quick, and they can be done throughout your instructional day. They aren’t necessarily meant to only be done during your writing time.

Okay, so the first activity is finding and fixing fragments. Raise your hand if your students are guilty of writing fragments. Mine definitely were, and it was one of those things that I felt like I could never figure out how to get them to fix. So something you can do to help students stop writing fragments is to have them practice finding—and then fixing—fragments that someone else has written.

Here’s a quick rundown of how this activity can work: you can give your students three sentences. You can have them on an anchor chart, displayed on a slide, or written on your whiteboard, but one of the sentences needs to be a fragment. You’re going to have students identify the fragment, and then they’re going to rewrite the fragment to turn it into a complete sentence. When they rewrite the fragment, it’s really going to force them to think about what is missing from the fragment that would make it a complete sentence.

As students are engaging with this activity, you can ask them things like: Does the fragment have a subject? Does it have a predicate? What do we need to add to make it complete? This is really going to help students become much more familiar with the essential parts of a sentence.

Another activity is probably one of my favorites, and that is unscrambling sentences. What this looks like is you give your students a sentence—it could be a sentence from a text you’re reading, a sentence they wrote that you’re going to mix up, or a part of your morning message—but you’re going to give them a sentence with all the words mixed up. They need to reorder the words to turn it into a complete sentence.

Ultimately, this task of rearranging words in a scrambled sentence is really going to help students in a variety of ways. First of all, it’s going to help them grasp the concept of what a complete sentence is. It’s going to help them understand the order in which words and phrases should be sequenced, so they’ll start to recognize that the subject comes before the predicate. It’s also going to help them solidify their understanding of the rules for capitalization and punctuation.

The great thing about this activity is that you can scramble statements, questions, exclamations, simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences. So it’s really a great activity to expose students to a variety of sentence types and structures. And just by the nature of the activity, students are getting practice writing a complete sentence—because in order to unscramble it, they ultimately create a correct sentence at the end. It’s a really great activity to help students strengthen their sentence writing skills.

And then the last one I’m going to share is called a because, but, so activity, and I actually recently did a YouTube video on this specific activity. So if you want more information and to see more examples, definitely go check out The Stellar Teacher Company on YouTube and find that video.

You’re going to start by giving your students a sentence stem related to the content, and then you’re going to end the sentence stem with because. You’re going to repeat it and end it with but, and then repeat it again and end it with so. So your students are really going to end up writing three sentences, all with the same first portion of the sentence stem.

For example, let’s say you’re doing a science lesson on plants. Your sentence stem could be: The plant wilted. But rather than just having students complete that one sentence, you’re going to give them the three sentence stems. So they would complete:

The plant wilted because…

The plant wilted but…

The plant wilted so…

Students need to complete all three sentences.

This activity is great for a few reasons. First of all, it’s really going to help your students grasp the understanding of whatever content you’re teaching. In order to complete the sentence The plant wilted because…, they need a completely different set of knowledge than they would to complete The plant wilted so…. So it really is a great way to assess their understanding of the content.

But also, from a writing perspective, they’re going to get a lot of practice writing complex and compound sentences. By the nature of adding in these conjunctions, we’re creating either complex or compound sentences—and we know that’s an important sentence writing skill, but one that is also so difficult for our students.

The really cool thing is that this because, but, so activity can be incorporated into any subject area, and you don’t even need to do much planning for it. Like I said, it really serves as a great check for understanding while also providing strong sentence writing practice.

So these are just three examples of sentence writing activities that you can use to really help boost your students’ sentence writing skills. Again, none of these take a ton of time—maybe just 5 to 10 minutes—and if you do one of these activities every day, it really would make a huge difference.

Okay, so let’s wrap up this episode by quickly talking about how sentence-level writing can fit into what you’re already doing. So often, teachers say things like, “I don’t have enough time to do one more thing. I don’t have time to do sentence writing practice.” Right? They assume it should have been done in first, second, or third grade. But really, you don’t need more time—you just need to be a little more intentional about incorporating sentence writing into what you’re already doing.

For example, during a reading lesson, you could write three sentences to describe a character, but make one of them a fragment and have students fix it. In social studies or science, you could put up a sentence with a key concept your students are studying, scramble it, and use that as a warm-up for the lesson. Maybe after reading a nonfiction article, you give your students a sentence stem using the because, but, so activity and have that be your exit ticket.

So it’s not really about needing to find additional time to focus on sentence writing. It’s just about really understanding how these activities can fit into what you’re doing. All of these activities can help boost your students’ writing skills and make it easier for students to show you their understanding of the content you are teaching. So it’s a win-win across the board.

Now, I hope that after listening to this episode, you’re feeling both excited and encouraged about spending more time focusing on sentences with your students. And I hope you’ll join me next week for the next episode in our writing series, because I’m going to be joined by one of our incredible curriculum writers, Kori, and we’re really going to talk about some things that you can do to support students with paragraph writing.

So until then, have a stellar week.