Arizona ELA Standard: 5.L.3.a

Students work with subjects, predicates, and conjunctions to write compound sentences.

When I see a quote, I often think, “That’s not quite right!”

Let’s help William Shakespeare with his use of repetition.

Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

Three paragraphs about the Empire State Building. They all cover the same topic — so what makes each one different? Now combine them into one super-paragraph.

What happens when we switch out a “but” with a “so”? An “and” with a “for”? How can such tiny words make such big differences?

Have students mastered the art of anadiplosis: ending one sentence with the beginning of the next? Now it’s time to take it to the next level!

Repeating words can be what you want, if what you want is an interesting effect. (Psst, that’s an example of anadiplosis!)

Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be writing sentences with three dependent clauses.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be contrasting two ideas using synonyms.

Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.

In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!

Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.

Is your students’ use of repetition limited to, “The girl was very, very, very fast.”? Let’s borrow some ideas from Shakespeare!

When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.

Can your students spot simple sentences vs compound sentences?

Can your students spot the run-on sentences?

Can your class spot the complex sentences vs compound sentences?

What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!

Your students’ sentences all start the same way. Here are three techniques that fix that overnight.

We’ll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.