Are you searching for no prep teacher resources for winter season sentence writing? Teaching elementary students effective sentence structure is one of the biggest challenges when examining student work. My students always struggle with the three sentence structures: simple, compound and complex sentences. I like the winter season because all students can take part in many of the enjoyable activities. In this blog post I will share ideas to boost student writing with three winter season sentence activities.
Why choose Winter Themed Activities:
Winter is a great time for language-based activities because it provides a natural theme for learning and allows for the integration of language skills into real-world situations and experiences. In the winter, there are many opportunities to engage in activities that involve language, such as talking about holiday traditions, reading and writing winter-themed stories, singing winter songs, and discussing the weather and how it affects our daily lives.
Winter language activities can be particularly beneficial for young learners because they provide a fun and engaging way to practice language skills. In this case, learning sentence structure can improve sentence fluency as students experiment with the three types of sentences via creating winter-themed stories.
In addition to helping children practice language skills, winter language activities can also foster social and emotional development. For instance, talking about holiday traditions and sharing stories about winter experiences can help children develop their communication and teamwork skills, as well as their ability to express their feelings and emotions.
Overall, incorporating winter season sentence writing activities into your lesson plans can be a fun and effective way to support language development and promote a love of learning in young children.
3 Winter Season Sentence Writing Activities
1. Winter Writing Bundle
This winter season sentence writing activity bundle is perfect for practicing all 3 sentence types: simple, compound and complex sentences. Students are supercharged with winter scenes that allow them to use descriptive language as they complete worksheets and snow globe, winter themed task cards that explore all three sentence structures. The no prep printables (or digital version) are perfect for a reading writing center where leveled opportunities are available
Click here to get the link.
2. Simple, Compound & Complex Sentence Writing
This winter season sentence writing activity is included in the bundle above, and can be purchased separately. Students first practice the 3 different type of sentence structures with stress-free printable worksheets. They then apply their knowledge of simple, compound and complex sentences with a visual winter scene. To boost writing to a different level, students finally create a winter season narrative essay in which they pretend to be stranded in a blizzard. Sentence stems and a Winter Wonder Word List is included to support struggling writers. Click here to view this step by step resource.
3. Winter Season Sentence Writing: Snow Globe Theme
Task cards are always a motivator, especially when students are given different winter scenes encased in a snow globe. This no prep, leveled resource scaffolds students when writing compound and complex sentences by first providing a sentence stem. For example: “There wasn’t a single soul inside the snowy log cabin, but. . . ” Student must complete using clues from the snow globe pictured. Includes 16 scaffolded task cards for both compound and complex sentences. In addition, there are 8 additional task cards allowing students to write their own sentence. Perfect for sentence writing center! Click here.
Suggestions For teaching
1. Simple Sentences
Remember to tell your students: a simple sentence has one independent clause (It can stand alone.) It has a subject (tells who or what) and a predicate (tells what the subject does or is). Have them create winter sentences and identify each part.
The glistening snow turned into a dangerous blizzard.
2. Compound Sentences
Remember to tell your students: a compound sentence is two COMPLETE thoughts or independent clauses combined together with a conjunction (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet and So). FANBOYS is a great acronym for recalling these conjunctions.
Ava and Jack were delighted for the first snowfall of the winter season, SO they immediately dashed outside and built a snowman
3. Complex Sentences
Remember to tell your students: a complex sentence has an independent clause (complete thought) and a dependent clause (can’t stand alone). Some dependent clauses begin with subordination conjunctions: AFTER, ALTHOUGH, AS LONG AS, AS SOON AS, EVEN THOUGH, IF, SINCE, THOUGH, UNLESS, WHENEVER, WHILE. Complex sentences can also start with an action verb as in the sentence below.
Lurking behind the winter evergreen, the two delicate penguins were waiting for the best time to escape.
Do you want to know how to prepare your students for state testing? Check out my blog post below or Click here .
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE FREE WINTER THEMED ANCHOR CHARTS FOR SIMPLE, COMPOUND AND COMPLEX SENTENCES. GREAT FOR A BULLETIN BOARD DISPLAY AND STUDENT FOLDERS!
