When kids learn to write, we’re so happy if they can get a 3-word sentence even if it includes tons of spelling mistakes, aren’t we? But as the year and grades progress, we’re sometimes frustrated when they can’t or won’t write more than 3-5 words per sentence…
Today, I’m sharing some ideas you can try out to teach students to stretch sentences.
Teaching Students to Stretch Sentences
First, it’s important to teach when and why longer sentences are important: it’s all about expressing the exact ideas they have in mind and that might require more words than just the few basics.
You could tell your students that if they don’t include more detailed information when they speak or write a sentence, their ideas get trapped in their heads and people might not understand what they REALLY want to say.
So make a list of questions they can ask themselves in order to add details to their sentences.
- Where?
- When?
- How?
- Why?
- What?
- Who? With whom? To whom? etc
- What time?
- How often?
- and so on.
The number and kind of questions will depend on the level of your students. If they’re Kinders or beginners in the language, keep it down to 3-4 questions. If they’re older or more advanced, you can up the number of questions.
Then, model (and model and model) what they’re supposed to do with these questions.
Write a super simple sentence on the board and work with students to make those sentences more vivid with details.
Here’s what that might look like:
- Write a sentence like: “Marie marche.” Then go through your list of questions and elicit answers from your students. As they give you the answers, write down the information around the sentence. Finally, rewrite the sentence with the new information included, so you can end up with something like: “Le dimanche, Marie marche lentement avec ses amies à la plage.” You can go from: “Le chien saute.” to “Le petit chien noir de ma tante saute haut quand il est content.”
- After you’ve guided them through this exercise as many times as needed, write a sentence on the board and, this time, have them work in small groups to stretch that sentence.
- Then, you can build this practice into your morning routine and start the day with one sentence stretch.
Teaching Students to Stretch Sentences: ideas and suggestions
Below I’m listing a couple of activities/games to help your students practice sentence stretching. After reading these ideas, I bet you’ll be able to come up with your own variations and new “games”.
1) Challenge students to write a sentence that has at least X number of words. The exact number will depend on the level your students are. It could be at least 5 words, or at least 9 words, or who knows? at least 11 words. You get to choose the number.
The point is that by challenging them, you turn sentence stretching into a game. You can even call it a game, which will immediately make them want to play.
You can provide the original sentence you want them to stretch, or you can just provide vocabulary words they would need to include in their sentence.
For it to really feel like a game, you can divide the class into small groups or pairs of students and assign points for task accomplished. For example, if they write a sentence that has the number of words you required, they get 2 points, then they get an extra point for each word beyond the number you requested.
2) For younger kids, you can tell them to imagine a dog detective investigating a robbery committed by a cat. Your students are witnesses to the crime.
The detective might ask students if they saw a cat around the crime scene.
If a student only answers: “Oui, j’ai vu un chat”, they won’t be helping much because there’s no clue for the dog detective to follow.
So the point is to say or write a sentence that would give as much information as possible for the detective to solve the case: What color was the cat? How big was it? Where was it when you saw it? Was it carry anything with it? and so on.
See who can give you the most detailed sentence, full of clues about the case.
To play this again, change up the animals, the crimes, and other context information and make it a weekly activity.
Hope you find this post useful in teaching students to stretch sentences.
If you do, share it with your teacher-friends!
Thank you for stopping by.
Merci!
Lucy
Read: Teaching phonics to anglophone students
Read: Literacy Center Ideas
