Lesson:
I spent the first part of the class period teaching the students different ways of starting sentences to add variety to their paragraphs. For this, I used Andrew Pudewa's material from his Institute for Excellence in Writing, with a little bit of grammatical explanation for the older students.
Sentence Openers:
Subject: typical "the noun verbed" format
The happy children played all day.
Prepositional: prepositional phrase
At the park, the happy children played all day.
"ly": adverb
Happily, the children played at the park all day.
"ing": participle or participial phrase
Laughing with delight, the happy children played at the park all day.
Clausal: dependent clause beginning with when, while, where, as, if, since, although
Since it was summer vacation, the happy children played at the park all day.
After that, Mrs. Arbogast read aloud the student compositions describing persons. The paragraphs were well done and the students enjoyed them immensely.
Assignment:
Students will write another paragraph describing a person. They are to include a good variety of sentence openers as we discussed.
(I would have preferred to move on to a different type of writing, but I thought it too much for the students to learn two new lessons at once.)
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