Do Middle School Students Need Sentence Writing Instruction?

Older Student Can Benefit From Sentence Writing Instruction

Yes! By the time students get to middle school, most teachers are focused on helping them write multi-paragraph essays, or at least solid paragraphs. The assumption is that middle school students should already know how to write sentences. But that assumption might not always be correct. 

Providing Students With The Right Writing Ingredients

Many middle school students struggle with sentence writing. They may be able to write simple sentences and some compound sentences, but they have difficulty writing more complex sentence types. Asking students with limited sentence writing skills to write fully developed paragraphs and essays, is like asking a chef to cook a gourmet dinner using only one or two ingredients. It can be done, but it probably won’t be very delicious. If we want middle grade students to learn how to write paragraphs and essays that don’t sound wooden and dry, we need to provide them with the right ingredients. 

What are those ingredients? Sentence writing skills. Sentence writing instruction in middle school provides students will the key ingredients that they need to become compelling writers. Students need to be taught how to write complex sentences. They need to be shown that they have several options when it comes to combining sentences. They need to learn how to expand sentences and how to use appositives to provide their readers with more details. Once students feel comfortable writing a variety of sentence types, they will be able to transfer those skills to paragraph writing and essay writing. When we take the time to teach and reinforce the basics, students will feel more confident with their writing.

Adding Sentence Writing To ELA Lessons

While there are clear benefits to teaching sentence writing in middle school, many educators don’t have time to fit it into their curriculums. Few middle school teachers and homeschool parents can dedicate weeks to a complete sentence writing unit. But there are ways to include sentence writing instruction to your lessons without giving up too much time.  I like to use explicit, text-based writing instruction, so it’s easy to pair sentence writing lessons with any text that we are coving in class. 

For example, if I were in the middle of a short story unit and I wanted to teach my students how to use appositives in their writing, I would simply start my class with a mini lesson on appositives. I would explain what appositives are and what they are not. I would give students a chance to identify and create appositives together as a class. Once I have gone over appositives, I would have the class read whatever short story I planned to cover that day. At the end of the story, instead of assigning reading comprehension questions to check for understanding like I normally would, I would give the student a worksheet on appositives. I would have them work in pairs to create appositives for the characters in the story and create sentences about the story using appositives. Doing this allows me to check for their understanding of both the story and appositives. It also gets them in the practice of writing about a text using appositives. I have found that using explicit, text-based writing instruction helps me to seamlessly incorporate sentence writing instruction into any lesson.

You can create your own sentence writing activities based on whatever topic you are covering in your class. You can also use pre-made sentence writing activities with all of the work already done for you. Click here to check out some of my pre-made activities.

Final Thoughts

Teaching sentence writing to middle school students is one of the best ways to help them improve their writing. Text-based writing instruction can help students stay on track with their English curriculum while building and strengthening their foundational writing skills. 

If your student needs help writing strong sentences, click here to check out my tutoring courses.