Teaching Sentence Structure

Students of all ages struggle with writing sentences.  It could be a tendency to write in sentence fragments or run-ons or only using simple sentences in their writing.  Students need to be able to understand how to craft different types of sentences in order to make their writing more engaging and fluent.

For a long time, I struggled with how to teach this until a fellow English teacher shared with me some tips on how to teach sentence structure.  Ever since then, I used some of these tricks in my own teaching. Here is a quick overview of how I teach sentence types and some activities you can do in your classroom. 

Independent and Dependent Clauses

The foundation of teaching sentence structure is to ensure that students can recognize independent and dependent clauses. Students need to be able to recognize these in sentences to distinguish

the type of sentence. 

A clause is a group of words that contain a subject and a predicate (noun and verb). Independent clauses can stand on their own as a simple sentence while dependent clauses are sentence fragments on their own. 

I give my students this allegory to explain it.  Independent clauses are like adults.  They can take care of themselves and do not need anyone else.  Dependent clauses are like children.  They must be connected to an independent clause because they can't take care of themselves. 

Types of Sentences

I then take the allegory a bit father and use it to describe sentence types using different family structures. While talking about the types of sentences  I use visual and examples.  I also have students identify the independent and dependent clauses in the example sentences. 

• Simple Sentences are one adult living by themselves.  They don't need anyone else. 
  
• Compound Sentences are a married couple.  Each person can take care of themselves, but they choose to get married and live together.  The coordinating conjunction and comma serve as the marriage license. 
  
• Complex Sentences are a single parent living with one or more children.  The child(ren) have to be connected to the parent because they can't take care of themselves. 
  
• Compound-Complex Sentences are married couples who have one or more children. 
  

Click here to get a copy of my Sentence Types Handout. 

Manipulative Activity

Next, I take sentence strips that I have created with different clauses, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, and punctuation and I have students come to the board to create sentences.  I like to color-code the different parts, and I put magnets on the back to make them easier to move around.  While we are doing this, I might change (or have another student) change the order of the clauses or the conjunctions used and talk about how that can change the meaning of the sentence. 

You can then break students in small groups and give them a smaller version of the manipulatives to do the same thing together. You can take sentences from worksheets or texts you are reading in class to break apart for this activity.  I have also created a free resource with some premade clauses here. 

Formative Assessment

There are a couple of ways you can assess your students. It depends on your goals for the lesson.  

1. Writing - Give your students a journal prompt and tell them how many examples of each sentence type you want to see in their response. (For my students, I normally have them write two simple, two compound, two complex, and one compound-complex sentences.)
2. Identification - If you want to see if students can recognize these sentence structures in what they are reading you can do a sentence scavenger hunt activity.  Students can look for examples of each sentence type in their independent reading or their assigned reading.  I have two versions of a sentence scavenger hunt include in my Self-Selected Reading Scavenger Hunt activity. It is currently $2.00 dollars for 11 reuseable scavenger hunts that can be used with any book.

How do you teach sentence structure in your class? What tips do you have to share? Leave them in the comments below. 

I will be presenting during the ELA Success Summit on August 4th - 6th. This is a digital summit that you can attend from the comfort of your own home. To enroll or learn more about the sessions you can go to https://www.elasuccesssummit.com/