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Teaching an “Inch Wide and a Mile Deep”. Objective: Students group sentences which are given to them on strips of paper into piles based on some criterion or contrast. (CBO)
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Teaching an “Inch Wide and a Mile Deep” • Objective: Students group sentences which are given to them on strips of paper into piles based on some criterion or contrast. (CBO) • Goal: Whole class, group/partner, or internal conversations about the sentences. These inputs equal “linguistic spillover”—what they read now spills over into future writing. 1 • For PSAT practice, sentence sorts will involve looking at sentences for their syntactical elements.
PSAT • Five basic grammatical concepts tested on the PSAT according to The Princeton Review (2005). • Verbs • Nouns • Pronouns • Prepositions • Other little things
Sentence Sort • Choose sentences that represent the skills you want to discuss from text the students are reading. • Working in groups or partners, students will “open sort,” putting the sentences in groups. • The students must be prepared to explain why they categorized the sentences the way they did. • Discuss and analyze sentences. • What do the conversations sound like?
Extensions • Students may imitate the writer’s sentences. • After imitating and practicing these sentence types, students will be expected to use these types of sentences in their writing. • The Sentence Sort can be adapted to whatever skills you need the students to study.
Grammar Practice • Working in pairs or small groups, students help each other highlight all of the prepositional phrases in each sentence. • Find the core sentence, checking for subject verb agreement.
1. Cambourne, Brian, The Whole Story, 1988, as quoted by Jeff Anderson in Mechanically Inclined, 2005.