Google Classroom – ReadAloudPlays.com

It’s easy to make the transition to remote instruction with Super Sentences. Here’s how:

Assign a specific time for your students to be online. While much of your home instruction may be independent work, the benefits of Super Sentences is the interactivity. The kids need to be online sharing their sample sentences and providing feedback to one another.

On Monday, introduce a new stream or thread in Google Classroom by typing the week’s given structure. For example, were I teaching structure #14, Command, I’d post this: “Commands give orders or directions, but they only require an exclamation point if they’re delivered in a commanding tone. For example, at the end of this lesson, your teacher may give you a command requiring only a period: Turn in your papers.”

In the same thread, type the sample sentence: “Take off your shower cap this instant or I’ll feed your liver and onions to the neighbor’s goat!”
Next, give the students three topics and invite them to post their own sentence. You’ll need to remind them to remain IN THE SAME THREAD. I’ve capitalized it because I’ve found students jumping threads is the death knell to online interactivity. This cannot be emphasized enough!
As students post their sentences, invite them also to comment on one another’s. I provide feedback by asking the class questions like “Can anyone help Chuck see what’s missing in his sentence?” Or, “Chuck is missing a key piece of punctuation. Can anyone spot it?” I also fire off compliments when I see a really great sentence such as, “Chuck’s sentence is awesome. Can anyone tell us why?” (Just added: here’s a screenshot of an actual thread with mu students; it ended up being about 80 comments long. Hopefully it’ll be legible enough to give you the gist of it.)

On Tuesday and Wednesday I repeat the same process, but I use one of the kids sentence as the example.

On Thursday, I have students post and submit their sentence on a Google Form. This is their weekly test. Have they learned the given structure? Were they able to write an error-free sentence? I grade these sentences and send each student feedback/corrections via Classroom.

Finally, on Friday I have my students post their corrected sentence on our class webpage. I create a post entitled “This Week’s Super Sentences.” Students post their sentences in the “comments” field.

Super Sentences was originally published by Scholastic. I’ve updated and made it available on my TpT storefront in various ala-carte volumes. Sentence structures range from simple sentences to things like “sentences containing a metaphor” and “sentences using commas in a series.” No, it’s not full blown essay writing (you’ll need Perfect Paragraphs for that), but it provides kids in grades 3 through 8 daily writing practice, leading them to develop that innate sense of sentence structure so important to reading and writing competence. It’s engaging because it uses their own writing as the lesson (as opposed to a traditional grammar text that offer stilted “Dick & Jane-type” sentences to correct). Give it a try. It’s inexpensive and come with reproduction rights (make sure you’re respecting copyright when posting online). Best of all, when this pandemic is over, you’ll have your complete PDF of Super Sentences to use no matter what the circumstances: in the regular classroom, in your computer lab, on Chromebooks, or remotely.

Take care, my friends!

At my school we’re expecting to be “teaching remotely” until the end of April. What that means remains to be seen, but it’ll obviously require a lot of content to be delivered online. Unless you can rig up a conference call with ten or twelve students at a time, reader’s theater is probably a scratch, so I’m focusing instead on other material. There is a ton of new fangled “plug and play” programs out there, but if you’d like a bit of the tried and true mixed in to your online content, here’s some of what I’ll be using next month.

Super Sentences will keep your kids writing and discussing even during a shut down. It has students write one sentence fitting a specific construct each day. One week you might work on “Dialogue Sentences” and the next you might teach “Sentences Containing a Compound Predicate.” Almost all your grammar instruction is embedded in the program, and it’s perfectly built for Google Classroom. You’ll get the nitty gritty in the detailed product instructions, but the basics look like this: Post the example and the tips as an “Assignment” and have each student respond with his or her sentence. Because the whole group can see the responses, both you and your students can provide feedback, just as in the regular class. On the next day, choose two or three sentences to repost with your teacher comments, and then have kids write new sentences, repeating this process daily until crafting error-free sentence on the test at the end of the week. Super Sentences comes in two ala-carte volumes. Volume One is included in tandem with Perfect Paragraphs, which is another item suited to online learning.

Perfect Paragraphs asks students to unscramble a sample paragraph fitting a specific genre. Once they’ve re-arranged the sentences in the proper paragraph format, they’re then directed to write a paragraph of their own on the same topic and following the same structure. (The concept here is that kids become proficient by initially imitating. Think human speech, or how you own child learned to read, or how Picasso learned to paint.) As with any writing task, editing, revising, and sharing follow. I plan on having my students complete one paragraph-writing activity every other week. Once again, the details are in the product instructions, but Google Docs is a perfect match given how teacher and student can watch one another write and comment in real time. Ideally, students will need to be able to view a PDF of the unscrambling worksheet and the paragraph writing template before doing all their typing in Docs. Perfect Paragraphs comes as a complete package or in three ala-carte levels, including a set of multi-paragraph writing tasks. You can try out a free sample here.

EZSub Plans are typically marketed to subs and teachers in need of emergency, self-directed lessons. Well, this is an emergency and it turns out these plans are pretty ideal for remote learning! You merely need to provide PDFs of each lesson. Each package always includes reading, writing, math, and art activities, as well as a few mini-lessons. Kids may have to be a bit more resourceful than they are in the classroom, making due with materials on hand and tracking down certain tools (such as a ruler), but most of it is within reason. EZSubPlans are fun for kids and designed to be easy to teach. They come in four grade levels—3rd through 6th–but they’re interchangeable to a large degree (the 3rd grade sets could be considered 3rd-5th; the 4th and 5th grade sets are suitable for 4th and up, etc.) If grading is important, students can send their answers to you via Google Classroom. Or if you prefer, you can simply share each included answer key and have students self-correct. Cake!

One super important asterisk about sharing all this material online: please be careful about posting copyrighted material. If someone outside your class can download it, you’ll be violating copyright. While programs such as Google Classroom allow you to share items within a private environment (students must sign-in), class webpages are often public or “open.” I see this frequently with Weebly pages. Teachers with good intentions share material from, say, Scope magazine. They’re simply trying to provide remote access to their students. The problem is that everyone else on the web can access it too. So, whether you’re using my products or someone else’s, please respect copyright by making sure your online access is restricted.

Now, how about we figure out a way to arrange that conference call? I’ve got some great Read Aloud Plays that are ideal for Spring, whether school is shuttered or not…

Let’s hope and pray for a quick end to this virus.