Opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not represent any other organization or affiliation I may have.

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Conjunctions: Helping students write better sentences


So a problem I always notice in my Middle Schoolers writing is their sentence structures. Too often it is repetitive, simple sentences. So, how can you teach conjunctions, complex and compound-complex sentences? Well there are some nifty videos you can try....

Conjunction Junction:






Flocabulary also has a great video (you can get a free subscription trial to access all of their videos)

and there are some other catch techniques, like FAN BOYS:



(You can get this poster from My life as a 3rd grade teacher blog Already, I have introduced FANBOYS to my students and they are using conjunctions excitedly. By middle school, they are familiar with FANBOYS (maybe not calling it FANBOYS or even using it knowingly as a "conjunction" but they are familiar with it) so it's like building off of existing knowledge which seems to catch-on quicker than brand new ideas. I am thrilled to see how it improves their writing as their last writing sample I assessed was very "simple" to say the least (simple sentences, get it? oh funny teacher joke) What other strategies have you used to improve writing and teach the different types of sentences....?

No comments:

Post a Comment