Lesson Plan
This lesson draws students to an important writing feature: varied sentence lengths. Middle school students who are weak writers typically rely on a single sentence structure. They also produce sentences of an unvarying length. This lesson will demonstrate to students that writers use patterns of varying sentence length to create rhythm, tension, and excitement in writing.
1. The Warm Up in the PowerPoint slide asks students to contrast a very short sentence and a very long sentence. This may be done in a whole group, as a Think Pair Share, or as a written journal entry.
2. Students examine writing samples from Brothers in Arms and identify sentence length as short, medium, or long. They then identify length patterns from paragraphs, with a particular emphasis on ending a paragraph with a very short sentence.
3. Students create on marker boards or paper original sentences that are of short or medium length.
4. Students write 3-4 sentences about given situations following a particular pattern of sentence length. For example, students are asked to write three sentences about an imaginary field trip to a tiger rescue center using this pattern: Medium sentence. Medium sentence. Short sentence.
5. Students listen as the teacher reads aloud a selection from Brothers in Arms. When students hear an interesting sentence length pattern, they mark it with a sticky note. After the read aloud is finished, students copy the paragraph onto an index card, read it several times alone and to a partner, and then write about the sentence length pattern.
