"High Five for Complete Sentences"

If you don’t already know how student teaching works, it starts off with a student teacher taking on a subject week after week. It is around mid-semester where all teaching responsibilities are handed over on a golden platter, with a smile of course! I can remember since high school the fear of student teaching and taking on all subject areas all in one day. Student teaching so far for me has been an amazing and engaging experience. More importantly I have been learning the gradual release theory in action with my CT (cooperating teacher) and myself. Slowly but surely I am finding my little nook in this teaching world and today marked a pretty big milestone…. it was my first lesson!

The first subject I have chosen to take on is writing! My CT and I thought this would be a great subject to start off with and a chance to get my feet wet before diving deeper into the curriculum. Planning for this week’s lessons, revolved around writing Complete Sentences! I have to say, I had a lot of fun coming up with engaging fun lessons for my third graders this week.

Today we focused on the topic of Complete Sentences and what is needed to compose a Complete Sentence. I found a great idea (on pinterst of course) over the “High Five for Complete Sentences”. This poster helped my students really understand all the parts needed into making a complete sentence and helped guide them through today’s activity.

After reviewing the “High Five for Complete Sentences” poster and discussing the two parts that make up a sentence (subject/predicate), the students engaged in a Complete Sentence dice activity. I have to note that these dice took me about three hours to create/cut/fold/glue! Aside from all that, my students had a phenomenal time playing with these dice. The objective of this activity is to roll a subject and predicate dice and create a Complete Sentence. It was funny to watch the students roll sentences such as “The pencil was very angry”. In these moments, students would refer to the “High Five for Complete Sentences” and say, “Well that doesn’t make sense!” (WOOOOOO!!) I’m pretty sure this was my first teacher proud moment. My students understood the objective today and walked away knowing how to compose a Complete Sentence properly! After today was said and done, this activity was placed in our classrooms reading/writing center for extra practice.

Below are some pictures of the activity from today’s lesson. Even though I am not able to post pictures of my students engaging in these moments, I will be sure to document what things they get to do!

Enjoy!