I am very excited to implement and research the brief writing routine that we call Sentence Imitating with a class of 5th graders that has a high percentage of emergent bilinguals. I developed the Sentence Imitating routine for 3rd/5th grade teachers in a past research project. The brief daily/near daily routine focuses on the goals of teaching students to use target connectives (e.g., although) and sentence structures (compound, complex, etc...). Here is an example of a typical lesson, in this case introducing the connective although:
We had great success with the Sentence Imitating lessons, which we wrote about a few years ago in our article on Teaching Vocabulary for Application in The Reading Teacher, and the teachers felt that it was especially helpful for their small number of emergent bilinguals--hence my excitement for implementing it in my new setting. I am currently working to extend the original lessons to move beyond compound and complex sentences and expository phrases (similarly, in contrast, etc...) to introductory phrases and other sentence elements. Given that I am planning for the class to engage in the Sentence Imitation routine consistently, the focal structures will definitely be something that I will plan to assess. I was planning to share our basic 3-minute progress monitoring writing assessment in this post, which will be one way that I will assess students' use of the target sentence structures. However, this post is feeling long enough, so I will focus the next post on my writing assessments, including the 3-minute formative assessment for writing foundational skills. If you have any thoughts or questions on Sentence Imitation, leave a comment below!
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