High Five Writing: An Easy Method for Complex Sentences

What are High Five Sentences?

While working with some second grade teachers last year, they voiced concerns about their student's sentence structure and feared it was too simple. We made a plan: High Five Sentences. As you would suspect...high five sentences are so great, you want to give someone a high-five. During this one day lesson, we challenged students to High Five Sentences...supporting them all the way.  We broke the students into partners and we gave them a Who? and a Did What? puzzle. Acknowledging that we had the makings of a good sentence, these sentences were deemed "kindergarten sentences" by the second graders.  We needs to amp up the sentence before we could call them High Five second grade sentences. First, we added more details to the Who? part of the sentence.  We added a gold piece of puzzle and added adjectives.  These students decided the lion was BIG and MEAN.  Once we added the gold puzzle, we decided we only had a High 2 Sentence (whomp, whomp).

Summer Reading: Getting Books in Their Hands

In July of 2015 we did a book study of Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Frazen's "Summer Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Reading Achievement Gap" .  It was really eye opening to me to look at the achievement gap in relation to the summer.  And my school took some actions to get more books into the hands of our students throughout the year.  A Readbox, stronger "take-home" program, and more listening stations are just some examples.