How To Teach Sentence Writing in Kindergarten and First Grade
Ah, sentence writing. One of the big milestones students need to reach somewhere in between kindergarten and first grade. To those who are not elementary school teachers, it may seem like a simple task. However, if you have spent any amount of time in a kindergarten or first-grade classroom, you likely realize just how much preparation, thought, and explanation goes into literally everything a teacher does.
Sentence writing is no exception. Students need to understand how to use spaces, capital letters, and punctuation. All while also making it make sense (again, a much more challenging task than a non-teacher might imagine).
My Sentence Writing Unit is the perfect stand-alone unit for you and your kindergarten or first-grade students. This four-week unit will take your students through everything they need to know to be successful sentence writers.
Let’s walk through the basics of the unit.
This is an additional four-week unit for kindergarten or first-grade students who need more explicit focus on sentence writing. Ideally, you’d use this unit after my Labeling Unit before moving onto my Narrative Writing Unit. Or you may pause whatever writing curriculum you are using and continue that curriculum after these four weeks. If you don’t have four weeks just pick and choose what lessons you need!
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, anchor charts, and all the practice pages and student resources you could want!
To make things extra simple for you, I’ve created digital slides that go along with this unit. All you need to do is project the slides and follow along! They are editable so you can adjust and add however needed.
Parent communication is vital, especially in the primary grades. Parents love, knowing what is going on in their child’s classroom and it will help your students grow even more if if they understand what you are teaching and why. So I’ve included several different parent letters so that you can print them off and send them home easily! One note explains the stages of writing, another explains the unit and its main teaching points, and one more explains phonetic spelling and it’s importance.
Editable rubrics are included as a simple way for you to keep track of student growth throughout the unit. And of course, celebration hats! If you have used any of my other units you know I love a good party!
What does it look like to teach this unit?
Let’s walk through a lesson together!
Before you teach the day's lesson, you’ll want to review it, print off any student materials needed, and be sure you have a way to share the anchor charts. You can do this digitally or by printing them out in color.
Each lesson plan is written out for you to use as you teach it. For each day, you will find a teaching point, screenshots of the materials needed (i.e. anchor charts, practice pages, etc.), a scripted mini-lesson, an explanation of the daily activity, and a chance for students to share their work.
The daily activities include things like practicing labeling, using their alphabet strips or name tags to write new words, unscrambling sentences, fixing sentences and rewriting them, and so many more other engaging tasks.
These lessons are built to be short and to the point with very explicit instruction. We know that this is how young learners learn best. It also makes it easy to fit these lessons into your already very busy day.
What skills are included in this unit?
As I mentioned before these lessons will cover everything your students need to successfully write a sentence. Here are the skills covered throughout the lessons:
- Sentence stems and labels
- Unscrambling sentences
- Capital letters
- Finger spacing
- Punctuation
- Naming and telling parts of a sentence
- Picture prompts
- Repairing sentences
- Independently writing their own sentences
How do I know if my students are ready for this (or if they need it at all)?
If you have not explicitly taught your students, how to label… STOP!
Students need to have the foundational skills of drawing a picture and labeling that same picture before starting this unit. 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.
This Sentence Unit is additional sentence writing practice without a focus on any genre of writing. If your students need explicit practice with sounding out and writing new words, definitely do the Labeling Unit first.
Once they have that down, I suggest completing this unit before starting my Narrative Writing Unit. This way students will go from labeling pictures, to writing one sentence, to writing an entire story!
If you are a first-grade teacher and unsure if you are students really need this practice think about these things:
- Do your students consistently use spaces?
- Do your students know and then use basic punctuation marks consistently?
- Do your students write sentences that make sense consistently?
If you answered no to one or all of those questions, I highly recommend this unit. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, you can always pick and complete only the lessons with the teaching points you feel your students need most.
Ready to get started?!?
Yay! You are on the way to having some super successful sentence writers in your classroom.
Grab my Sentence Writing Unit here! If you are looking for more developmentally, appropriate writing resources, my Writing Curriculum is for you! You can also check out my TPT storefront to find other engaging and fun resources!
