On 7/4/07 10:15 PM, "kimberlee hannan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> She said it was mainly a revision strategy, but I can see it being used for
> a whole lot more than that.
>
> She took a long drawn paragraph from Across Five Aprils. She broke it down
> into its smallest pieces. We combined it together and discussed the vision
> we were getting as we dealt with each part. Finally we read the actual
> paragraph. Not only was our sentence very close to the actual author's, the
> paragraph made complete sense. She said if we did that with shared novels
> before we got to the complicated ones, they made much more sense to the kids
> and they are familiar.
>
> I thought there would be books about this strategy. I moved since the CATE
> conference and the paperwork is in a box somewhere on the back patio.
> Hopefully, I will find it before may daughters inherit it.
> Kim
>
There is actually research that shows sentence combining does have an impact
on writing - not huge - but an impact nevertheless. I did just what your
prof did with my 5/6 graders. We would do usually one paragraph (or several
long sentences) from a novel we were reading. I would look for interesting
sentence structure possibilities. It was a great way to discuss not just
simple grammar issues and choices and punctuation involved in putting
sentences together in particular ways, but also the author's style.
I also did one other paragraph (or several sentences) - also interesting
ones - where my students created their own sentences using the skeleton
grammatical structures of the given sentences. My students loved this
activity, maybe even more than the sentence combining. I long long ago read
a piece of research by James Christie which showed that being able to put
together (compose) particular sentence structures had an impact then on
being able to read them. His examples tended to be more like the "imitation"
I just described than the sentence combining but I think it would work the
same way. Primary teachers have long been doing this with variations on
texts. "If I were in charge of the world, ......" and kids write their own
variations. And we've been talking about that with music/songs!
They also loved then running into these spots in the story. I think both
had an impact on their comprehension (a really close reading obviously) and
their writing. I saw a particularly big impact on their writing. They no
longer settled for simple or compound sentences or even for adjective or
adverb clauses. Rather they tended to use more sophistical structures like
nominative absolutes, appoisitives, and so on - that kind of piling on of
details in sentences through phrases that is so much more characteristic of
sophisticated writing. I definitely didn't over do it. Most work on writing
came through writing workshop and most reading through reading - reading
workshop in all its glory!
Sally
_______________________________________________
Mosaic mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to
http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
