There are so many moving parts to the teaching of sophistication, but one thing is for certain ...
Students need to learn how to flex their voice, rhythm, and flow if they ever want to truly grow and mature as writers.
As many of you know, I heavily rely on Strunk & White's seminal text, "Write It Right" to teach these concepts.
In their work, which you can locate for free online as a PDF, they assert that there are 12 different ways to cobble together a single sentence (referred to as Rule #18).
Here's the thing:
Most of our struggling and emerging writers only wield 2-3 of these constructs.
So, what to do?
In my first video, I present my old-skool Viewmaster activity whereby I teach your students how to manipulate all 12 sentence constructs (plus the requisite parts of speech).
And to really solidify the concepts while giving students ample opportunity to practice, I created a Bingo-esque game (called Spingo) that highlights 150 mentor sentences to really hammer home these essential compositional concepts.
The video highlights how to run the game from start to finish.
It's a ton of fun, packed with a heavy pedagogical punch!!
If you would like the answer booklet containing all 150 mentor sentences, plus the slides for Viewmaster and Spingo, drop me a line at [email protected]
This took yeoman's work to put together ... but it's how I want to begin my school year in the fall .. and I'm thinking other teachers might want to follow my lead.
I think these two lessons are perfect for solidifying these core principals.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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