Silly Sentences

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• Divide the students into groups of four.
• Give each group a set of sticky notes.
• Each student in the group should have one note of each color.
• As a class, brainstorm nouns. Encourage the students to come up with interesting nouns. Have the group agree on one noun and have one student write it on his noun sticky note.
• Have the group decide which article is needed with the noun.
• Repeat this process with the other three parts of speech. Have different students do each part of speech for this process.
• Have the students place the sticky notes on the board to form a silly sentence.
• Read the sentences aloud as a class.

Guided Practice

• Tell the students to brainstorm other interesting nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and write them on the proper colored sticky notes.
• After that is done, have the groups experiment with different arrangements of the words to form different sentences. While they debate and converse about their sentence formations, encourage students to build onto comments or link their comments to another students' ideas.
• Provide some of the following sentence frames:
  • "I agree with ____ because..."
  • "I disagree with ____ because..."
  • "What you said made me think about...."
• Model using the sentence frames with a student if necessary.
• Have each group share their sentences with the rest of the class.

Independent working time

• Give out sheets of storybook paper.
• Have students pick their favorite sentence to write and illustrate.
• Ask them to identify each part of speech by writing an abbreviation under each word (art, n, v, adj, adv) or writing in the colors that correspond to the sticky notes.