This 45-minute drill helps students learn 4 to write kinds of sentences.
Lesson Introduction
The aim of this guided writing activity is to reinforce and improve skills by reviewing existing knowledge and focusing student attention on 4 sentence patterns.
This writing activity is not designed to provide a comprehensive review of the grammar points.
Instead, the aim is to help high beginner+ students practice 4 useful sentence patterns:
- appositives
- simple sentence
- compound sentence
- complex sentence
Step 1 Review (10)
Run through the slides. They provide basic explanations and some examples. At the end of the slide show, there is one sample question for students to complete as a whole class. This is a chance for the teacher to inspect understanding before moving on to the next task.
Step 2 Introduce Task (5)
With this fresh knowledge, students will begin a writing assignment. The students will:
- watch short video called Paperman (5 minutes).
- make notes about plot and details
- identify 5-7 main chunks in the plot
Step 3 Watch video (5)
The 5-minute video is called Paperman.
Step 4 Writing (25)
I suggest the following process:
- give students a chance to work in pairs if they want (some of my writing students hate pair work)
- allow 10-15 minutes to outline main chunks in the plot
- point out that each will chunk will need 4 sentences
Output:
- Each student will have divided the story into 5-7 chunks. Each chunk will have 4 sentences.
- That means each student will have written 20-28 sentences.
Step 5 Option (15)
This activity is designed for student development without the need for teacher review or feedback.
Peer review is possible. Honestly though, it’s not something I do because many students don’t like to get writing feedback from other students.