All aboard..... The complete sentence!

We decided that we needed to do something about the frustrating fragments that often plague our third graders' writing.  Therefore, we started the school year by teaching the four types of sentences during Lang. Arts time.  Immediately after that, we tackled subjects and predicates.

Slowly, our ideas started chugging.  When brainstorming, we often try to come up with some sort of visual that students can apply to a new concept.  We decided to try using a train analogy to teach subjects and predicates this year.  We could teach students to think of a complete sentence as a train, with the subject being the train's engine, and the predicate serving as the train's caboose.

After the whole group lesson, the kiddos worked as a team to put subjects and predicates together( ocean theme of course )

Not  only did our third graders really seemed to enjoy the subject & predicate activities we did, we can honestly say that they really seemed to latch onto the train analogy!  As teachers, we were very pleased with their progress following this unit.  Best of all, it seemed to make a difference!  Although we still had students who occasionally used fragments, these incomplete sentences didn't seem to plague the students' writing .Furthermore, once we brought the fragment to their attention, students understood how to fix the problem almost immediately!  

  

Choo choo!