How to Review Sentence Structure with First Grade Students

It’s the end of the school year. Kindergarten students have gone from knowing only a few letters to sounding out words, to reading and writing sentences! Woohoo! These 6-year-olds are officially ready to move onto first grade, and their first-grade teachers are overjoyed with the amount of knowledge they will start the year with. 

But then summer happens. Three months away from the classroom. And those well-prepared kindergarteners…well unfortunately they've let some of that newfound knowledge slip from the brain. It’s the summer slide and it happens to most students to some extent, even with the very best of teachers. 

But what are these first-grade teachers supposed to do? How do you go back and teach everything they learned in kindergarten while also starting your own curriculum? It’s overwhelming! 

So I created a unit that solves it all. It reviews all the basics of writing that they learned in kinder, while also being simple and easy to use. And the lessons won’t take more than 20 minutes! 

The Sentence Writing Unit is exactly what you need at the beginning of the school year! 

What is the Sentence Writing Unit? 

This is an additional four-week unit for students who need more explicit focus on sentence writing. There are 20 lessons covering skills from capital letters and finger spacing to repairing sentences and writing them independently! 

When you purchase this unit off of my TPT storefront, you automatically gain access to everything you need to successfully teach about sentences. This includes four weeks of lesson plans, a calendar outlining the unit and its daily teaching points, daily slides, anchor charts, and all the practice pages and student resources you could want!

You can read more detail about what is included in the Sentence Unit and how to teach it in this blog post! 

It sounds like a lot. Can it really be used as a review? 

One of the best things about this unit is its flexibility. The lessons are short and sweet, taking no more than 20 minutes to explicitly teach and practice a skill. This means you can add a lesson to your already busy schedule rather easily. If your students have already been taught and have a basic understanding of these concepts, there is no need to do all of these lessons. Pick and choose the lessons your students truly need! Then, teach them to the whole group during writers workshop, or any time of the day that you can squeeze it in. You could even teach a lesson during small group rotations (making it possible to differentiate and teach lessons based on the needs of each small group)! 

There are over 75 practice pages included when you buy this unit. Once students have a strong understanding of the skill, you could use any of them throughout the school year as a simple review for your students without having to teach the entire lesson! 

How do I know if my first-grade students need this? 

If you have first graders, at any point in the school year, struggling to write sentences that make sense, forgetting their capital letters consistently, forgetting spaces, or missing their punctuation marks… this unit is for you! I highly recommend doing the entire unit but if you do not have time, pick and choose the lessons that work for you. 

Students need to have the foundational skills of drawing a picture and labeling that same picture before starting this unit, most of the time this is taught in kindergarten but your first graders may need the refresher. My Labeling Unit will build those foundational skills. If your students are still struggling with drawing basic illustrations, I suggest taking the time to stop and complete my Illustration Unit as well. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have students with a strong understanding of sentence structure and you feel they are ready for more, my Narrative Writing Unit is a great next step! 

Ready to get going?

Grab my Sentence Writing Unit here! If you are looking for more developmentally appropriate and engaging resources, head over to my TPT Storefront! Searching ‘Sentences’ will give you so many activities to choose from!