Stretch It.

Dogs bite.

Birds sing.

We write.

These are complete two word sentences, with subjects and predicates. In order to help my students develop their writing skills, I present the class with a sample two, three or four word sentence, and then challenge them to add on descriptors to make the sentence more interesting.

Some dogs bite a lot.

Birds sing pretty songs in the morning.

We write longer and longer sentences in class and add adverbs and adjectives in order to develop an interesting mental picture with our words for our readers.

This model has served me well. It is like a game, and has been well received by various age and ability groups. I can construct a list of choices (such as articles and pronouns) to jump start the writing. Or the class might brainstorm verbs together - even acting them out before writing them on the board. We might draw pictures of places or events in order to lead the descriptive writing. Students can work individually, and using a Thesaurus can help. Pairing students or allowing table groups to work on sentences together is fun. There are numbers of ways to build on this writing task so that it is accessible to all and refreshing each time we tackle the Sentence Stretch Challenge.

This works.

Try it.