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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Woops, Look At Your Sentence!


Do you work on this as hard as I do? I have been using mats like this for years to provide practice in building a sentence but my students still struggle with the conventions of writing. Ther's not much transfer happening. Many of them have never held a pencil before this year and this is still very demanding for them. What's a teacher to do? I even built a reader with these same repetitive sentences in them and I created these mats to practice the language ( in my Farm Fresh Fun packet) and now I will give them a recording sheet to practice this skill. Maybe I will put them in teams with the words in a baggie and see if they can figure out their sentence... hummm. The recording sheet might be the key to success.

11 comments:

Kristin said...

These are adorable! I love the polka dot backgrounds!!! :)
A Teeny Tiny Teacher

Mary said...

LOVE this idea!
I feel like I am the ONLY Kindergarten teacher that doesn't teach a farm unit at this time of year.

Mary
Sharing Kindergarten

Kelly said...

Very cute activity for writing conventions! I start out teaching capitalization and punctuation on our morning message. We do a Friday "fix-it sentence" where the kids have to fix my mistakes. This seems to help them catch on a little bit!

Fran Kramer said...

I love the fix- it idea later in the year when they understand this better.

Michelle Griffo said...

This is a great way to practice!

Michelle

Apples and ABC's

Ms. J said...

I agree these are very cute!!

Miss J
Smiles, Crayons, and Endless Stories

Megan said...

Hi, Fran! I just love all of your cute ideas! One thing that has seemed to work for some of my kids to remember to use periods at the end of a sentence, is that when we finish reading a sentence, we make a click sound with our tongue, which reminds the students to add a period. We always do this together during interactive writing, and they then do this at their seats when journaling.

Anonymous said...

I do sentences with sticky notes for each word and then I was going to give small groups the notes and have them make the same sentences again. We got side-tracked and didn't get the small group activity done the next day (I forget what came up...something). I am going to do this again after Spring Break. I love the mats (I think I might have some generic ones hidden somewhere in my 3rd grade stuff...something to dig out during break).

How do you test for conventions and concept of print...specifically that words have spaces? Do you use the students writing or do you have another way?

Terri Izatt

Fran Kramer said...

Hi Terri,
My kids take a writing proficiency each trimester that is district based (but I help write the prompt).
Fran

Mrs. C said...

WHEW... so we are not the only kinder class still working on this! I am pinning your post for TBA!

Unknown said...

Great post! I love the mats. I do scrambled sentences with my students, but do not use the mats. I can see where it can really help some of my kinderkids who have difficulty ensuring their sentence makes sense.
❤Mrs. McKown
Little Literacy Learners