Teaching Complex Sentences is Complex

Teaching Complex Sentences is...

COMPLEX!!! 

One of our goals every year is to make writing more FUN and ENGAGING. Since we teach 4th grade, our students learn quickly that we take writing very seriously. So, when it comes time to practice critical grammar skills, we always trying to incorporate new group activities and games. One of the toughest skills we teach is
identifying types of sentences. They so struggle with this skill!

Since it's January and we're just getting back from break, we always start off by reviewing the difference in simple and compound sentence structures.

Then we introduce subordinate conjunctions (AAAWWUBBIS) with an anchor chart and interactive notebook page from our Complex Sentence unit. Click HERE to see the entire unit in out TpT store.




Next, we wanted a memorable way to have our students practice complex sentences. We all enjoy the book series "What If You had Animal!?" by Sandra Markle. The students work in groups completing a list of dependent clauses to make silly complex sentences. We have so much fun building complex sentences using silly animal sentences. It's amazing what a little creative imagination can do to make our kiddos forget they're actually learning!






The following day we share their silly animal complex sentences. Afterwards, our students got to do a fun hands-on activity to bring one of their complex animal sentences to life.






We always love reading our students sentences and drawings.

But wait, that isn't all we do! It never hurts to have one more quick assessment. We recently discovered Quizlet Live. Our students are totally obsessed with playing it. So we took our Complex Sentence Digital Task Card Slides and created a Quizlet Live game. They are super-simple to create, and we made it public. If you would like to play it with your students, click HERE to access the game for free!



If you would like to purchase the rest of the digital task cards in the set, click HERE

We'd love to hear how you teach complex sentences in your classroom!




2 comments

  1. I love all of the different things you're doing to teach complex sentences and make it fun! This is going to be my big push starting in the next week or two.

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  2. You are doing a tremendous job. It is very enlightening and achieves what it desires. I will make sure that I read all of your blogs in future. Every information you said on concept of Compound complex sentence is very useful . It will definitively enhance my knowledge.

    ReplyDelete

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