Hochman Method Aligned SUPER Bundle: Lessons 1.1-1.9 (For Elementary School)

Guide your students on their path to becoming excellent expository writers!

Together with Dr. Judith Hochman’s wonderful Writing Revolution System, this product is designed to help students fully understand the purpose and structure of a sentence and develop the ability to compose complex sentences that reflect extended thinking.

This bundled product includes oral examples for teacher modeling, in-class activities, and some homework assignments related to introducing the following concepts and goals of lessons lessons 1.1-1.9:

Lesson 1.1: Sentences and Fragments

Students often use sentence fragments or incomplete sentences in spoken language, and they may continue to use them as they learn to write. However, writing requires far more precision than speaking. Students need to be able to spot fragments in oral or written activities before attempting to correct fragments in their own work. Students may need lots of practice distinguishing fragments from complete sentences.

Practicing sentence-defining and sentence-ordering activities:

- Helps students understand the concept of a complete sentence and discern

sentence boundaries

- Helps students understand correct word order

- Provides practice with capitalization, punctuation, and using new spelling and

vocabulary words

- Serves as a comprehension check

- Helps students understand the meanings of subjects, predicates, and

prepositional phrases

- Encourages careful reading

Instructional Goals:

1. Distinguish between a fragment and a complete sentence

2. Convert a fragment into a complete sentence

Lesson 1.2: Scrambled Sentences:

Students enjoy rearranging jumbled sequences of words into correctly punctuated and capitalized sentences. At the same time, they’re developing and honing their grasp of the concept of a complete sentence, learning correct word order, and reinforcing their knowledge of the rules of punctuation and capitalization.

Practicing sentence-defining and sentence-ordering activities:

- Helps students understand the concept of a complete sentence and discern sentence boundaries

- Helps students understand correct word order

- Provides practice with capitalization, punctuation, and using new spelling and vocabulary words

- Serves as a comprehension check

- Helps students understand the meanings of subjects, predicates, and prepositional phrases

- Encourages careful reading

Instructional Goals:

1. Rearrange jumbled sequences of words into correctly punctuated sentences

2. Write a statement with a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end

3. Write a question with a capital letter at the beginning and a question mark at the end

4. Write an exclamation with a capital letter at the beginning and an exclamation point at the end

Lesson 1.3: Sentence Types:

A solid understanding of the four types of sentences is useful for students writing topic sentences and concluding sentences for paragraphs. The four types are:

1. Statement (Declarative)

2. Exclamation (Exclamatory)

3. Question (Interrogative)

4. Command (Imperative)

Practicing sentence-type activities does the following:

- Enables students to vary sentence structure

- Provides one way to improve topic and concluding sentences in a paragraph

- Introduces students to forming questions

- Helps students learn correct punctuation

Instructional Goals:

1. Distinguish among statements, questions, exclamations, and commands

2. Add correct punctuation to each of the sentence types

Lesson 1.4: Questions:

It’s as important for students to learn how to generate questions as it is for them to learn how to answer them. When students formulate questions, they’re developing higher-level cognitive functions while at the same time focusing on the main idea of the content that provides the basis of their question. To teach this skill, show students a picture and ask them what questions the picture suggests.

Practicing question activities does the following:

- Encourages the students to think about the important features in text

- Encourages close reading

- Helps students to focus on the key elements of questions

- Gives students practice in understanding and using expository terms

- Helps students anticipate what questions they may be asked

Instructional Goals:

1. Given a picture or text, write one or two questions about it

2. Write a question from a given response

Lesson 1.5: Phrases and Clauses:

Students who understand how to rearrange the phrases or clauses within a sentence while retaining the sentence’s meaning are capable of writing more linguistically complex sentences.

Practicing activities with phrases and clauses does the following:

- Develops the ability to craft linguistically complex sentences that use written

rather than oral language conventions

- Develops the ability to write extended responses

- Enables students to vary sentence types

- Provides a way to develop topic and concluding sentences

- Improves reading comprehension by familiarizing students with more complex

syntax and sentence structure

Instructional Goals:

1. Rearrange the phrases and clauses within a given sentence

2. Produce more linguistically complex sentences

**Since the concepts and goals of this lesson (1.5) are challenging, it is recommended that the work be completed together in class with teacher guidance.

Lesson 1.6 (Part 1):

Conjunctions: but, because, and so:

Using conjunctions to connect words, phrases, and clauses helps make writing clear and linguistically rich. It also provides more information to the reader. Much of what students hear, read, and write in their everyday lives is couched in simple language and structures. But much of what they’re expected to read in school is linguistically complex. When confronted with complexity in literature, expository text, and original documents, students often have difficulty extracting the text’s meaning. Conjunction activities enable students to craft more complex sentences themselves. As they do so, they also develop the ability to understand such sentences when they encounter them in their reading.

Practicing conjunction activities does the following:

- Develops the ability to write extended responses

- Checks student comprehension

- Develops analytical and deeper thinking

- Fosters close reading

- Develops the ability to craft linguistically complex sentences that use written rather than oral language conventions

- Enhances reading comprehension by familiarizing students with more complex syntax and sentence structure

- Provides a way to develop topic and concluding sentences

Instructional Goals:

1. Write sentences using the conjunctions but, so, and because

2. Use subordinating conjunctions in the beginning or middle of sentences

3. Combine two or more sentences

4. Produce complex sentences using sentence startersLesson 1.6 (Part 2):

Subordinating Conjunctions:

Most students don’t use subordinating conjunctions in their spoken language, so they may not know what some of these conjunctions mean or how to use them. If students encounter such constructions in their reading, that lack of familiarity can interfere with their comprehension. When students learn to use this kind of syntax in their own writing, they become better able to understand complex texts, and their oral language becomes more sophisticated as well. Once students learn to use subordinating conjunctions, they’ll also be able to write extended responses that are rich in complexity and content.

Practicing subordinating conjunction activities does the following:

- Promotes the use of complex sentences

- Improves reading comprehension

- Enables students to vary sentence types

- Boosts vocabulary development

- Encourages close reading and references to text

- Checks student comprehension

- Enables students to extend their responses

- Provides a good option for topic and concluding sentences

Instructional Goals (with use of Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina):

1. Introduce the ten subordinating conjunctions that are most frequently used to begin written sentences

2. Produce complex sentences using subordinating conjunctions as sentence starters

3. Use subordinating conjunctions in the beginning or middle of sentences

4. Combine two or more sentences

5. Apply reading comprehension skills

Lesson 1.7: Sentence Combining

Sentence combining is one of the most powerful strategies in writing instruction. Extensive research has found it to be the most effective way of teaching grammar. It also gives students greater control over syntax, which is the way words and sentences are put together and ordered.

Practicing sentence-combining activities does the following:

- Effectively teaches grammar and usage

- Encourages students to produce more complex sentences

- Enables students to see various options for crafting sentences

- Exposes students to varied writing structures and enhances syntactic flexibility

- Helps students focus on what is important to include in a sentence

- Improves fluency in writing

Instructional Goals:

1. Combine two short, declarative sentences using pronouns, commas, and conjunctions as needed

2. Produce complex sentences using sentence starters

Lesson 1.8: Appositives:

In addition to sentence types and subordinating conjunctions, appositives are a third strategy that will help students compose complex and interesting topic sentences when they write paragraphs and compositions. Level 1 and younger students (below third or fourth grade) may have trouble grasping the concept of appositives. They may confuse them with relative clauses, which begin with who or which and include a verb. You’ll need to use your judgment about whether or not your students are ready to be introduced to appositives.

An appositive is a phrase that can be removed or covered up without making the entire sentence incomplete. An appositive defines or describes a person, place, or thing.

Practicing appositive activities does the following:

- Provides an effective strategy for creating topic and concluding sentences

- Enables students to vary sentence structure

- Enables students to include more information in a sentence and add complexity

- Improves reading comprehension

- Enables teachers to check for comprehension

- Encourages careful reading

- Familiarizes students with a form that is often seen in text and rarely heard in spoken language

Instructional Goals:

1. Identify an appositive (noun phrase) in a sentence

2. Match a noun with the appositive that best describes it

Lesson 1.9: Run-On Sentences:

Run-on sentences are an all too frequent problem in student writing. If your students have trouble with run-ons, try putting a run-on sentence on the board daily (preferably embedded in content or relating to a subject students already know something about). When you first start this routine, ask a student to read the sentence aloud, without pausing, and then ask the class what’s wrong with it. Discuss and correct the run-on sentence together.

Instructional Goals:

1. Identify run-on sentences

2. Correct run-on sentences

3. Use subordinating conjunctions at the beginning or middle of sentences

Lesson 1.10: Sentence Expansion:

When they’re writing, students often assume that their reader has extensive prior knowledge of the subject matter they’re covering. Sentence expansion encourages students to think about what the reader knows already or may need, or want, to know to better understand the students’ writing. Using this approach, students are able to provide information with greater precision.

To prevent student confusion, remember to follow all Hochman Method guidelines related to sentence expansion activities as per the manual.

Practicing sentence expansion activities does the following:

- Enables students to anticipate what a reader needs to know and to provide

that information

- Checks comprehension

- Enables students to craft written language structures

- Develops the ability to summarize When

Instructional Goal:

1. Expand a sentence using two or three of the question words: who, what, when, where, why, how

**Since the concepts and goals of lessons 1.6-1.10 are challenging, it is recommended that the work be completed together in class with teacher guidance.

Each product in this bundle is also sold individually at my store.

Please Note: This product has been designed as a complementary activity to be used along with the full Writing Revolution Hochman Method. Before printing, teachers can choose from two different types of handwriting lines.

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