I seemed to have taught sentence structure a lot recently; its teaching that students need again and again. I am always surprised how often I think senior students know all about sentences but once I start explicitly teaching sentence structure it becomes clear that they have big gaps in their understanding. For most students once they realise there are rules for different sentence structures, that they can follow, they find them easier to use in their writing. I have created some resources that can be used as one offs or as a bundle.
These resources get the students writing a variety of sentences. I find that often it is not until they are writing their own sentences, that student realise how much they don't know and that sentences are not as easy as they seem; especially when you don't know the rules. We often expect students to use a variety of sentence structures, for effect, in their writing but don't always make the time to teach this explicitly.
Teaching sentence structure provides a great opportunity to link with reading. For example if we were learning about complex sentences my students would need to find and analyse complex sentences in the text we were reading or they might find simple sentences and change them into compound ones.
Click on the pictures below to have a look at the resources that I use when I am teaching sentence structure.
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