If you have read Teach Similar a Champion ii.0, you'll be familiar with 'The Fine art of the Sentence'.

The technique is described as follows:

Ask students to synthesize a circuitous thought in a single, well-crafted sentence. The subject field of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.

Sentences are the simplest mentor texts and students with a command of constructive judgement-building tend to produce the best writing. At my school, Dixons Kings University, we've been starting every lesson with The Art of the Sentence. It's a simple strategy with a massive impact.

Improving thinking

A well-constructed judgement is nigh more than simply literacy. The best sentences really ameliorate the quality of thinking. Every bit Doug Lemov writes, "…helping students acquire how to write increasingly complex, subtle, and nuanced sentences is teaching them to develop increasingly complex, subtle, and nuanced thoughts."

Hither is an example from a list of analytical sentences shared by Andy Tharby:

________is motivated not only by… but also past…

This structure enables-or forces- students to think in a specific way about the text. As students are presented with more and more of these sentence constructions, they volition accomplish for just the right one when they want to think precisely well-nigh a concept.

AOS 1Nosotros asked staff to reflect on the habits of thinking we needed to develop in our students and and so designed sentences to promote this. For case, in many subjects there is a demand to consider and so express cause and effect. Which sentences might help students to develop this habit of thinking?

As a result of_______________, ______________________.

One inevitable outcome of___________________

____________________________ is a direct result of

AOS 3 Building vocabulary

Precision of expression is crucial non just at the judgement level, simply at the word level. Most words are learnt from context, not through the teaching of them, and a single encounter with a word volition be unlikely to ensure full and rich knowledge. But repeated exposure to a range of carefully chosen words is an approach worth taking. (See Choosing which words to teach)

Inc AOS 2 reasing purposefulness

Every lesson starts with an aesthetic sentence. While the sequence tin be extended and sentences studied- as I do repeatedly- this tin can also be completed speedily at the starting time and the uncomplicated routine makes lesson starts more purposeful. I apply mini whiteboards, some teachers use computers, some books and some just ask students to think of their response. The immediate habits of thinking and working set the tone for the balance of the lesson: no minute is wasted in the pursuit of learning. Teachers and then transition into the teaching of the subject.

Our Director of Literacy took on the mammoth task of creating slides, trawling the internet for interesting and unusual images to use, and designing just the right sentences.

Initially, at that place were small issues that needed addressing. Some students were using the sentences without the precise meaning. For example, one student in my form wrote, "Ultimately, there is a cat and a bird."  This follows the instructions of the job, just with no real agreement of why we should use that word. Also, with the wrong image /sentence combination, sentences don't really work either. "On the surface" only works if in that location is something deeper that is non on the surface. The first time that students run into a word such as "inevitable", it probably has to be explained. The second fourth dimension might require another explanation but students soon become information technology.

In one of my recent lessons, students were writing a paragraph comparing Helena from a Midsummer Night'southward Dream with a typical Elizabethan woman and I saw this: "Helena differs from a typical Elizabethan woman in a number of ways respects." This topic sentence construction had been used on a number of slides. Then, in another lesson, a student wrote: "Ultimately, Romeo is a tragic hero and is fated to die." I hear the sentences in form discussion and see them in writing with increasing frequency.

Next steps

So far, we have used the same sentences beyond the schoolhouse, but we will shift to making them more subject specific, assuasive students to develop the vocabulary and precision of thought in a detail subject discipline. We volition also increase the complexity of some of the sentences now that students are grasping the concept. At present, we accept been constructing sentences based on images but adjacent volition be graphs, extracts from literature, historical sources.

Farther reading:

Doug Lemov on The Art of the Sentence

David Didau on The Fine art of Beautifully Crafted Sentences

Chris Curtis' Decease to Sentence Stems! Long Live the Sentence Structures!

Andy Tharby's Sentence Escalator