This Lesson's Title:

Special Days
to Love

improving sentences with thoughtful prepositional phrase

This lesson idea was built for WritingFix after being proposed by NNWP Teacher Consultant Kim Polson at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The ideal "mentor text" that can be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Click here to view this book at Amazon.com.

If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

Students write a paragraph about a special day they remember, then search for prepositional phrases in their rough draft. After a read-aloud of All the Places to Love, students talk about Patricia MacLachlan's use of prepositional phrases to give her sentences flow. Students revise their special day paragraphs to use meaningful prepositional phrases that share memorable details. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this writing assignment is sentence fluency; writers are to consciously consider using more prepositional phrases in their sentences, especially in their sentences' beginnings. The support trait here is idea development; prepositional phrases--like Patricia MacLachlan's--share high quality details, and as students add them to their writing, they should be encouraged to carefully craft detail-filled prepositional phrases.