3/27/07

Super Sentences: A Super Way To Teach Vocabulary

Super Sentences® are super ways to help students review their vocabulary words and have fun at the same time. True, when they first are asked to produce these sentences, they may go overboard by trying to cram too many of these words into one sentence. For a short while, that’s OK, but then you’ll be able to encourage (and model) sensible sentences.

Because students will probably need to look at past lessons in order to find suitable words to put into these sentences, this exercise will ignite their memory of past words, whether they are from a word web or a Real World Word® or the Wicked Word of the Week®.

Students in 7th grade and higher would most likely enjoy devising a whole story. They could compose these either as individuals or in a small group. You might assign or suggest that they use a combination of narrative, expository, descriptive, and persuasive sentences. Whenever students write one or more paragraphs, they provide you with a great opportunity to measure their mastery of specific elements of your language arts program, including their handling of mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, apostrophes) and whether they expressed themselves using complete sentences.

You can run right down the whole list of Language Arts Lesson Planning that I provide either in the front of your teacher’s manual or in the Teachers’ section of Word Web Vocabulary’s website, assigning the particular components your students still need to master. These could be the class’s spelling demons; different types of sentences (declarative, compound, etc), agreement of pronouns and their antecedents. Or, you could assign a specific number of simple, compound, or complex sentences; various types of introductory clauses; ask for inclusion of some dialogue with correct punctuation. Listen for clichés, and check for misspelling of confusing pairs (choose/chose; clothes/cloths; desert/dessert; effect/affect; loose/lose, principal/principle, etc.) and possessives.

Super Sentences are one of the best ways you can ensure your students are aware of previously introduced vocabulary words. If you haven’t already encouraged your students to do this type of work and rewarded them for these efforts, now is the time to do so.

One more thing, please let me know how working with Super Sentences affect your classes. Contact me elinormiller@seepub.com.

Please do get in touch. If you do I'll even explain what I mean when I say that the main difference between Word Web Vocabulary and all other programs is that students become immersed, not just exposed to, word study.

That’s my Word for this time.
Ellie

Word Web Vocabulary - recommended on Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' website - Moving vocabulary from the edge of language arts to its center