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A thread on sentences - in 10 parts. Yesterday I had my weekly small group tutorial for English but I didn't have enough time to prepare @TheWritingRevol materials in advance. 1/10
By this point in the year, we have been working on sentences for about 6 or 7 months and so every day I have been making one or two content embedded grammar warmups for my 10th and 11th grade students. 2/10
Folks, by doing this work...I was able to, on the fly, create 3 different differentiated content embedded grammar activities for my 3 students...each working with different texts, each with different strategies, and each with different levels of complexity! 3/10
@TheWritingRevol has not only helped my Ss become better readers and writers, I have felt it sharpen my own reading, writing, and teaching skills and also my overall understanding of language. 4/10
Gone are the days where I'd simply write "awk" or "word choice" next to S errors, or give them back their papers with a sea of red ink on them, each error meticulously circled. Instead, b/c of TWR, I might write "expand the why" or "start w/ a subordinating conjunction." 5/10
As my thinking & learning about language & writing have sharpened, so has my feedback. It's explicit & done on the sentence level BEFORE Ss write pages and pages. The great thing is, with enough practice Ss are able to edit/revise their own writing, and be explicit about it. 6/10
I knew about grammar before all this, but not like this. What TWR does so well is give Ts & Ss a bunch of high leverage strategies, in a extremely well scaffolded systematic way. 7/10
This scaffolding is key because it allows for Ss to actually *do the work* w/o being so cognitively overloaded that they get caught up in lots of terminology or low leverage skills that are practiced in isolation. Writing good sentences is already a complex endeavor. 8/10
To wield subordinating conjunctions, appositives, pronouns, & more into good sentences, especially for ELL Ss is incredibly complicated. There are lots of decisions to be made. I think we undersell the complexity of writing in general, but good sentence writing in specific. 9/10
So I'd like to end by continuing to praise the good work of @TheWritingRevol, @JudithCHochman, & @natwexler & encourage all Ts, at any level, to take some to read their work & linger for a while on sentences. Your Ss will be better readers, writers, & thinkers for it! 10/10
