Sentence Science 3-6 Explicitly Teaching Sentence Structure
Location
Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership
About
Join Jess Walta for this practical and engaging professional learning workshop designed to strengthen students' oral and written sentence construction in Years 3 to 6.
By the upper primary years, students are expected to write compound and complex sentences and to choose sentence structures that suit their purpose and audience. Yet many students are still unsure what makes a complete sentence, relying on run-ons, 'and then' or sentence fragments. When the foundations are shaky, more sophisticated structures are hard to build. This session unpacks those missing links and shows how oral language remains the key to confident, controlled writing at every year level.
Teachers will explore how to:
Build strong oral sentence foundations through engaging games, songs and activities that work for older students.
Revisit the basics of a subject-verb sentence quickly and effectively, so every student has a secure starting point.
Develop students' use and understanding of subjects, verbs, objects, adjectives and adverbials (where, when, how and why) to expand noun groups and verb groups with purpose.
Teach compound sentences explicitly, using coordinating conjunctions to join clauses accurately.
Introduce and build complex sentences using subordinating conjunctions, including moving the dependent clause to the start of the sentence and punctuating it correctly.
Support students to eliminate run-on sentences, comma splices and 'and then' from their writing.
Help students vary sentence length and structure for effect across narrative, persuasive and informative texts.
Use oral rehearsal before writing so students can hear whether a sentence works before they commit it to the page.
Plan for a writing genre through a Sentence Science lens, with a focus on oral language at the start of the unit and continued throughout.
Grounded in the principles of Sentence Science, this approach makes sentence construction visible, structured, engaging and achievable. Sentence Science gives upper primary writers the tools to talk about, build and improve their own sentences, on and off the page.
This workshop is ideal for teachers of students in Years 3 to 6, as well as literacy support and EAL teachers. If you are new to Sentence Science, you are very welcome. We will cover all the colours and the simple, compound and complex sentence structures, so you'll leave ready to start in your classroom straight away.
By the upper primary years, students are expected to write compound and complex sentences and to choose sentence structures that suit their purpose and audience. Yet many students are still unsure what makes a complete sentence, relying on run-ons, 'and then' or sentence fragments. When the foundations are shaky, more sophisticated structures are hard to build. This session unpacks those missing links and shows how oral language remains the key to confident, controlled writing at every year level.
Teachers will explore how to:
Build strong oral sentence foundations through engaging games, songs and activities that work for older students.
Revisit the basics of a subject-verb sentence quickly and effectively, so every student has a secure starting point.
Develop students' use and understanding of subjects, verbs, objects, adjectives and adverbials (where, when, how and why) to expand noun groups and verb groups with purpose.
Teach compound sentences explicitly, using coordinating conjunctions to join clauses accurately.
Introduce and build complex sentences using subordinating conjunctions, including moving the dependent clause to the start of the sentence and punctuating it correctly.
Support students to eliminate run-on sentences, comma splices and 'and then' from their writing.
Help students vary sentence length and structure for effect across narrative, persuasive and informative texts.
Use oral rehearsal before writing so students can hear whether a sentence works before they commit it to the page.
Plan for a writing genre through a Sentence Science lens, with a focus on oral language at the start of the unit and continued throughout.
Grounded in the principles of Sentence Science, this approach makes sentence construction visible, structured, engaging and achievable. Sentence Science gives upper primary writers the tools to talk about, build and improve their own sentences, on and off the page.
This workshop is ideal for teachers of students in Years 3 to 6, as well as literacy support and EAL teachers. If you are new to Sentence Science, you are very welcome. We will cover all the colours and the simple, compound and complex sentence structures, so you'll leave ready to start in your classroom straight away.