It is important to purposefully teach students how to extend or stretch their simple sentences. Teaching students to use who, what, where, when, why and how in their writing will not only help them add details and content but also help develop their writing voice!
To do this, students will need to make connections and infer!
Making Connections is how the student can relate to what they are writing. To extend and add detail to a simple sentence like “The girl cried”, the student will need to understand why someone might cry. What could have happened? Using their own personal experience as a guide, only then, can they infer why the child might be crying and add the details of WHY? WHERE? WHEN? HOW? and WHAT HAPPENED? to their writing.
Small group or whole group Guided Writing time is a great place to start with teaching sentence stretching.
We like to post an image with a simple sentence that students can then work on adding details to using the WH key words and How.
In the beginning, it is helpful to add one key word to our simple sentence at a time.
See our example page below.
The sentence went from “The man focused.” To “The man focused on his 100m track.” and with each new key word addition the sentence grew and became more interesting and detailed!
Check out our TPT store for our Sentence Stretching with Real life photos pack.
It’s time to say goodbye to boring simple sentences.
