This Lesson's Title:

Counting Sentences' Words

so your sentences' words
count more

This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. Check out all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here.

The ideal "mentor text" that can be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. 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:

The writer will study Jane Yolen's sentence fluency techniques; Yolen uses a variety of sentence beginnings and sentence lengths to achieve a rhythmic flow through her prose.  Each writer will take a short, and non-descript sentence with an action verb.  The writer will use the short sentence as an inspiration for a paragraph that varies sentence lengths and sentence beginnings. 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 asked to consciously plan a paragraph with a variety of sentence lengths and sentence beginnings.  The support trait in this assignment is organization; the original paragraph-inspiring sentence can become a thoughtful paragraph introduction or conclusion.