It's only the second week of school, and I'm already starting to do the "juggling act!" There is so much introductory content to cover in such a short period of time. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir! While I'm spending the majority of our class time on the writing process (as promised!) we're also working on complete sentence mini-lessons.
The major concept that I'm trying to stress right now is that complete sentences can be long or short, but they must
have a subject and predicate! This is the anchor chart I've used for the past couple years:
Fortunately, my students came to me with awesome prior knowledge of nouns and verbs. After defining subject and predicate/how they relate to nouns and verbs, I wrote the following sentence:
Dogs bark.
I asked, "Is this a complete sentence?" All four class periods reacted the same exact way; which almost never happens! I heard "No!" coming from all sides of the room, but after some wait time and a slight grin from me, "No!" quickly turned to "Yes!" As I underlined "dog" with red and boxed "bark" with green, it started to sink in. This sentence was great proof that a short sentence does not have to mean an incomplete sentence. If it has a subject and predicate, it's complete!
Kids commonly struggle with finding the subject and predicate of a sentence, so I made a FREEBIE printable for all you hardworking writing teachers out there! Keep fighting the good fight. They will get it, and it will help them for years to come!
