For the most part, sentence structure should be invisible, like the skeleton of a person. It’s the message that the sentences tell, not the structure of the sentences, that we should focus on when reading.
Most children write sentences in predictable similar patterns: a subject followed by a predicate connected by a coordinating conjunction to another subject and predicate. If there are prepositional phrases, they go at the end. My dog ran, so I chased him up the street.
How to shake up the monotony of children’s sentences is challenging. One way to do this is to have students copy sentence patterns while using their own words.
For example, see how the sentences below, taken from an article on Neptune*, can be used to write a paragraph about Disney World.
Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is the last of the hydrogen and helium gas giants in our solar system.
Bright, crowded and filled with happy children, Disney World is my favorite place in the warm and sunny southern state of Florida.
It is invisible to the naked eye because of its extreme distance from Earth.
It is visited by millions because of its big airport in Orlando.
Neptune’s atmosphere extends to great depths, gradually merging into water and other melted ices.
Disney World’s crowds come from far away, even traveling from Brazil and other South American countries.
In 1989, Voyager 2 tracked a large, oval-shaped, dark storm in Neptune’s southern hemisphere, a “Great Dark Spot” that was large enough to contain the entire Earth.
In 2016 I visited the tall, white-painted building in the Magic Kingdom’s heart, “Cinderella’s Castle” that was big enough to contain my whole fourth grade.
Triton is extremely cold.
Disney World is really wonderful.
With first or second graders, I choose sentence patterns that are short and easy to duplicate. If I am teaching parts of speech, I might combine a writing lesson with a grammar lesson. I model how to write sentences using other sentences as patterns before I ask students to try writing on their own.
With older students, we might discuss the various ways the sentences begin (in the examples above, with adjectives, a pronoun, a possessive noun, a prepositional phrase and a noun). We might count words and discuss how differing lengths add variety (22, 14, 14, 28 and 4 above). We analyze whether sentences are simple, compound or complex. (Four of the examples above are simple and one is complex.)
If students keep a writing notebook, one section could be a collection of sentences they have patterned. Later, when they are writing, I encourage them to use their notebook fo sentence structure ideas.
Modeling new sentences on given sentence patterns can be a useful writing homework assignment.
* NASA.gov, adapted by Newsela staff, https://newsela.com/articles/lib-nasa-neptune-overview/id/22033/
English Writing Teacher 