Super Sentences

     I was unsettled about the Runaway Pumpkin activity from Friday, mostly because it seemed too hard for about 7 students.  I wanted to re-teach the art of a super sentence so as I drove my 45 mile commute, I mulled, which, actually, is a great time to think up some really powerful lessons.
     Some background is that my team of four first grade teachers recently attended training on how to GLAD-ify our teaching, meaning make language more accessible to all students (well, focused on ELL, but in first grade they are all acquiring language).  One of the strategies is sentence patterning.
     A sentence patterning chart and subsequent activities are extremely powerful.  Students are taught about the parts of speech in an informal way.  For now, they are being taught the pattern of adjective, noun, verb, and prepositional phrase, and we use the academic language peppered with the definition to make it more understandable.
     We, my first grade level team, call a sentence "super" if it follows this pattern because it gives more information to the reader.  To extend, I add a little editing portion once they've "finished" (in quotes because I'm forever being told, "I'm done") and shared out that in order to make it "perfect" check for a capital, spaces, and period.  It's so cute when they all at once turn their heads toward their papers to fix errors!
     So after weeks of supported, scaffolded, and guided sentence building based on the sentence patterning chart, I was more than a little dumbfounded.  Why was it so hard?  After mulling, I decided it came down to mechanics and not enough support.  Those seven students were bogged down by poor fine motor skills, lower ability in phonemic awareness, and general lower ability than the rest.  Differentiation, re-teaching and more practice was clearly needed.
     I am very pleased with my re-teach lesson, as they all were successful without having to have much assistance from me.  To begin I wrote three super sentences on the board and I had them "turn and talk" about which words were the adjectives, which the noun, etc.  So I underlined the parts of speech in the color coded fashion that is GLAD.  For example, "The black cat zoomed through the living room."  Once they'd decided, I chose volunteers to say which was which.  I proceeded with two more sentences.  Then I erased and drew the colored lines on the board without any words, but reminded them which was which and wrote that in the academic language.  I then had them "turn and talk" about a sentence they could make up and share.
     They came up with fabulous sentences!  So much oral work is what was missing from my Friday lesson.  To guide toward independent practice, I put a picture of a pumpkin up on the digital projector so they could go to their seats and write a sentence, but wait!  When I put the picture up...

photo credit unknown

 ...I had them put their heads together in their teams to come up with a pumpkin sentence that followed the pattern.  I then called on the numbered head (kids are assigned a number within their team) to report out a sentence.  They came up with, "The orange pumpkin is sitting on the balcony,"  "A fat pumpkin is sitting on a bus seat."  "The orange pumpkins are sitting on a mat."  I gave feedback for each one, honoring their creativity.
     Here is what they made on their own papers:

This student had a very hard time during Friday's lesson.  When I got to her, she was already halfway done! Her pumpkin sat on the window sill.

This student needed support from me, as his paper had no spaces between words.  I helped him sound out as well. His pumpkin fell off the slide at school.

This activity was easy for this student.  He could have added more, but was content to have it done and color. His pumpkin sat on the vine.

This girl had a very original idea!  That is a balcony and she wasn't sure about her spelling of  "pumpkin" so she marked it with an sp.

In the amount of time it took some to write one sentence, this student was finished with three.

     You can see that classes have an enormous array of ability levels.  Finding the right balance so all can be successful and not bored sure is a balancing act!