Read articles by Joan Sedita
Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure (Part 1)
Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure (Part 2)
The Writing Rope, The Strands That Are Woven into Skilled Writing Joan Sedita, December 1, 2019
The Common Core of Literacy and Literature by Joan Sedita
Helping Your Child With Organization and Study Skills By Joan Sedita
Orthographic Mapping by Joan Sedita
What is happening in this picture? Why do you think?
Who / What do you see?
Does it look like anything is missing from this picture?
Let’s make a sentence with _____________ (this word)
You can say ________ or you can say _________ (Teaching synonyms)
What would be the opposite of ____________? (Teaching antonyms)
Do you know that (this word) has 2 meanings: 1st meaning, 2nd meaning...
Questions to Build Knowledge of Characters ana Settings.
Who are the characters in this story?
Where is the setting in this story?
Are there multiple settings in this story?
What are some emotions the characters experience throughout this story?
When did they experience these emotions in the story?
How do you think this character is feeling when...? Why? How do you know?
What do you think this character is thinking? Why? How do you know?
What are some actions the characters performed throughout the story?
What are the results of some of these actions?
Questions to Improve Sequencing Abilities for Retelling Purposes.
What happened at the beginning of the story? What words can we use to start a story?
What happened next?
What happened after that?
What happened last?
How do we end a story?
What was the problem in the story?
Was there more than one problem? What happened? Who solved it? How did s/he solve it?
Was there adventure in the story? If yes, how did it start and end?
Questions to Improve Verbal Reasoning Abilities for Retelling Purposes.
How are these two characters alike/different? (compare/contrast)
What do you think will happen next? (predicting)
Why / How do you think ____________ happened (inferencing)
Why shouldn’t you , couldn’t s/he _________ ? (answering negative questions)
What do you think s/he must do to _________ ? (Problem–solving)
How would you solve his problem? (Determining solutions)
Why is your solution __________ a good solution? (Providing justification)
Questions to Improve Social Cognition for Retelling Purposes
How did the ____________ feel when ___________?
What is his/her mood at __________ point in the story? How do you know?
What is his/her reaction to the ___________? How do you know?
What is his/her reaction to the ____________? How do you know?
How does it make you feel that s/he are __________?
Can you tell me two completely different results of this character’s actions?
What could you say to this character to make him/her feel better? Why?
What would you think if ________ ?
Sentence structure writing practice
Give a map of word order in the longer sentence
Who? – the subject
What? – the verb
Why? – the reason (why was the action taken?)
Where? – the place where it all happened (action, using the appropriate tense)
When? – the time (using prepositions)
How? – the manner in which it all happened
The cat jumped on the table because it wanted to taste the milk.
The who and the what are the questions for a simple sentence, but once your students begin to feel more comfortable, encourage them to answer the other questions as well.
Once the students know the basics, have them play around with the parts of speech and put a sentence in order following a formula:
(adjective) Subject + (adverb) verb + (preposition, adjective) object
A black cat quickly jumped on the big table.
Build a Sentence Pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ssgUCsbe0p7rgxryH-wQC5d8UvKXRrsP/view
Use color coding
Whenever your students write, let them use color code the parts of speech.
Blue: action, linking, and helping verbs
Green: adjectives
Light Blue: adverbs
Purple: articles
Yellow: conjunctions
Orange: prepositions
Red: nouns
Pink: pronouns
Lime Green: determiners (e.g., What?)
Black: punctuation marks
Use Key Education’s Big Box of Sentence Building. The puzzle set includes 250 puzzle pieces covering 90-word families, 60 consonants, 60 consonant blends, 10 digraphs, and includes 4 blank pieces. A resource guide with teaching tips and more phonics games is also included. Big Box of Sentence Building helps kindergarteners and up practice vocabulary and grammar, improve sight word recognition, and develop essential knowledge and skills for reading success through a fun phonics game!
Check FREE Clinical Narrative and Discourse Assessment Materials in Speech Pathology
Check the books recommended by the SALT Software Company, because they are highly engaging to the students and also because there are free scripts and rubrics available.
For children from Preschool-1st grade, use the Frog Books by Mercer Mayer
For 2nd-grade students, use Pookins Gets Her Way by Helen Lester
For 3rd-grade students, use A Porcupine Named Fluffy by Helen Lester
For 4-5th grade students, I use Dr. De Soto by William Steig
For students ages 12-18, use the Peer Conflict Resolution Tasks first discussed in a 2007 research study by Nippold, Mansfield, and Billow.
Check Kaiko Kasza books for kids http://www.keikokasza.com/
Grammatical Targets Spreadsheet (FREE)
Transitional words http://home.ku.edu.tr/~doregan/Writing/Cohesion.html
Cohesive Ties in English at a Glance by Halima Benzoukh (Kasdi Merbah University, Algeria http://rrlinguistics.ru/en/journal/article/1173/
