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Lesson Plan

Sentences: Complete or Fragment?

A deeper understanding of what constitutes a complete sentence will help your young writers understand how to create technically correct and more complex sentences. This practice will help students edit and revise their writing.
Grades:
Subjects:
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Learning Objectives

Students will be able to identify complete sentences and fragments.

Introduction

(5 minutes)
  • Review that, in order to be a complete sentence, a sentence needs a subject and a predicate. If a sentence doesn’t have both, it’s a fragment.
  • A complete thought (or complete sentence) has a subject and a predicate. That means you can identify a “who/what” and a “what about it.”
  • Project the example on the top of the worksheet Building Sentences and model finding the subject and predicate.
  • Separate the subject notecards into one pile and the predicate and dependent clause notecards into another pile. Shuffle the second pile so that the clauses and predicates are mixed up.