Mean Meanings
Students look up multiple definitions of a word and make sentences. These are shared with classmates who select the word that should fit in the sentence. Students write their own sentences to demonstrate understanding.

Successful Paragraphs
This activity guides students through the writing process for a successful five-sentence paragraph with varied sentence beginnings. Repeating this process frequently with many, varied topics teaches students to use variety to create interesting paragraphs.
 

Discovering Language Arts:  Style, Structure, and Tone:  From descriptive language to the variety of sentence structures to the elements within a paragraph, introduce elementary students to the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of writing. You can watch all of the video or just a segment. This is hosted on Discovery Education unitedstreaming, and to access it you must have your user name and password.  All teachers in Alabama can get this information from their school's media specialist or technology support teacher.

Suggestions for English Language Learners: 
(E/B=Entering/Beginning, D=Developing, E=Expanding)

(E/B) Students copy correctly and effectively written sentences off the board for practice.
(D) Note each time a writer changes the subject in a descriptive passage that lacks coherence.
(D, E) Students keep a writing log in which teachers create sentences that are incorrect that students self-correct or work in small groups/partners to correct.

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