FUNdamentals of Sentences

A few days ago I posted about the Sentence Detectives activities I use in my classroom.  I use them during Word Work time as part of our Daily 5 rotations.  My students walk around the room, find the words that match the pictures on their response sheet, and write them down.  They then illustrate the sentence they wrote, and use our symbols to code the main parts of a sentence.  They look for the beginning of a sentence to start with a capital letter, the punctuation at the end of the sentence, the subject and the verb.  Once they find these elements, they are to use symbols to code them in their sentence.  Sometimes their sentence is missing a capital letter or ending punctuation, and if that happens they must correct the sentence before coding it.  We have practiced this again and again during whole group, and now that they are more comfortable with it they are working independently.  Here are some samples of the work they are doing with the Sentence Detectives activities.

You can see where this student coded their capital letter and ending punctuation, but couldn't seem to decide which word was the subject and which was the verb.  The illustration almost matches the sentence, but is missing the dog.

In this example, you can see where the little coded the sentence and then realized it needed a capital letter at the beginning, so he corrected it.  The illustration matches the sentence perfectly.  Using this student product, I can see that he has the parts of a sentence down but still needs some practice with letter formation.

This kinder has all of the parts of his sentence labeled correctly and drew the correct illustration.  When I sit down to conference with him, we will talk about remembering to color our illustrations and to try and use as much space in the box as we can for our drawings.

This one has it all!  The sentence is written and coded correctly, with very nice letter formation.  there is a matching illustration that shows lots of detail.  This little is ready to move on to more complex sentences.

Last one.  This friend has written the sentence correctly and drew a matching illustration with lots of detail.  When I conference with her, we will do some more work on subject and verb recognition, since that seems to be giving her trouble.

All in all, my knders ROCKED this independent activity!  Luckily for me, I made several different response sheets for each packet so they can continue their practice!

Finally, I wanted to share with you my hand-drawn sketch of how I want my room to look next year.  I made sure to do it in pencil, since I may change my mind between now and then!

I hope you have a Happy Hump Day!! 

p.s. - I only have 13 more student days!!  :-)