These students have benefited from having a systematic approach to teaching sentence construction that offers them scaffolded and repeated practice in identifying and writing sentences of various types. For the younger students, we spent the first few weeks focused solely on the parts of a sentence as even the terms "subject", "noun", and "verb" were new learning for them. Having a visual in along with the metacognitive component of checking that their own sentences are complete has been important. The students have also benefited from having a goal and action steps toward achieving it, so the pace of the learning is tailored to them. Introducing the students to the various types of simple sentences has helped the older students generate writing that is clear and more descriptive.
