Sentence Construction

During the Guided Reading segment of our Daily Five, students are responsible for composing a sentence like the sentences they read in the Guided Reading book.

For example: we read a story called Bigger (B level book) by Liza Charlesworth. The sentences on each page reads like this: The dog is bigger than the cat. The cat is bigger than the mouse. etc.

I then ask students to compose a sentence in the same fashion. I write their sentence on a sentence strip and cut out each word. If I have 4 people in a guided reading group, we will have 4 different sentences. Then I pass the words out to the students at random. As I ask for the words to one of their sentences, students must supply me with the correct word. Then we read the sentence together, and the student who came up with the sentence takes the sentence home for practice.

The benefits are:

• students comprehend what is in the story and can compose a sentence on their own.
• students recognize sight words.
• student recognize that the first word in a sentence has a capital letter.
• students recognize the last word in the sentence will have a punctuation mark at the end of the word.

I found that students were able to have a deeper understanding of the story using this method. They also are very engaged in coming up with their own sentence. Student worked together to supply the correct words in the sequence they needed to be in.

Give it a try!

Melanie Weinlein