This Lesson's Title:

Combining with Participial Phrases

verbs (serving as adjective phrases) that launch action-packed sentences

This lesson idea was built for WritingFix after being proposed by Nevada teacher Rebekah Foster at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Dancing in the Wings by Debbie Allen. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Check out Dancing in the Wings at Amazon.com.

Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:

Pre-step (before sharing the published model): Before sharing Debbie Allen's book, do a mini-lesson with your students on participial phrases. Tell them that using participial phrases can be a great way to vary sentences for rhythm and flow, and it can also be a great way to combine two short sentences when revising.

Use the overhead below to have students start thinking about participial phrases and their punctuation requirements.

• Overhead resource for teaching participial phrases

Step one (sharing the published model):  Teachers should stress, as they read the cited picture book aloud, what the author has done particularly well in writing this story: in this case, author Debbie Allen has incorporated participial phrases as part of her sentence structure variety.  She uses them to add spice to the descriptions of characters; instead of merely using adjectives, Debbie Allen takes active verbs and turns them into participial phrases in order to help the reader visualize the trials and tribulations of her main character.

Read the book a second time, if desired, asking students to listen for and remember as many participial phrases from the story as they can. Tell students they will be writing a descriptive paragraph today about a character involved in an exciting moment, and they will use three different participial phrases in their paragraph.

The interactive activity on the Student Instructions Page is a follow-up to reading the story, and it attempts to inspire students to come up with an idea for their own original stories, using original participial phrases to add to their sentence variety.

Step two (introducing models of writing):    Before they write their own, In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the student models that come with this lesson.  The groups will certainly talk about the sentence fluency , since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's conventions as well.

• Three fourth graders--Waheeb, Hanna, and Hibah--share their participial phrase-inspired stories
• Two ninth graders--Mara and Alex--share their participial phrase-inspired stories
• We're looking for student samples for middle school for this prompt!  Help us publish some, and we'll send you free books for your classroom!  Contact us at publish@writingfix.com for details.

Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Students need to think of a situation where a character would be involved in a series of actions. A sporting event is a good possibility. Or a dance. Or a fifty yard dash. Or an exciting moment on the playground. Or even some sort of story about an escape.

If students can't think of an idea for a story, they can press the buttons on the Student Instructions Page, which will give them a participle and a character idea. One of those combinations might just inspire a bigger paragraph.

Start by having students write a list of short sentences about a character in one of these action-packed sequences; have them do this on a piece of paper and ask them to skip lines between sentences. Encourage students to use a different action verb in each short sentence.

Next, have students draw arrows between any two sentences whose actions might happen simultaneously; participial phrases don't work unless the actions of the sentence are more-or-less happening at the same time. Encourage students to draw at least three arrows between sets of sentences that could be happening at the same time, and encourage them to quickly add a new sentence to their lists if they don't have a sentence that meets that criteria yet, but they can think of one.

Encourage students to think of interesting adjectives or prepositional phrases they might add to their short sentences that have arrows between them. Ask them to add them in the margin or in the space beneath their original sentences.

Let them work with a partner to figure out how to combine their "arrowed" sentences with a participial phrase. Remind them that the participial phrase could go at the beginning, the end, or smack dab in the middle of the other sentence. Show them the examples on the overhead again, if necessary.

Each partner should create three sentences that have participial phrases, and their partners should help them check for correct commas and spelling.

Walk through the class, and help students make good choices about their participial phrases.

Finally, tell students they need to write a descriptive paragraph of five to seven sentences that show the character doing the action the writer has planned. Not all sentences should have participial phrases. Students should try to spread them throughout the paragraph. Students should try to have all three types of participles (beginning, middle and end) represented in their paragraphs.

Step four (revising with specific trait language):  One tool for revision is provided below.  To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach WritingFix's Revision and Response Post-Its to your students' drafts.  Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5."   Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings.  For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.

• Sheet of 6 Sentence Fluency Post-It Notes

Step five (editing for conventions):  After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor.   If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers.  With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it.  The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.

Step six (publishing for the portfolio):   When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block.  Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here.  Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.

Interested in publishing student work on-line?  We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers.  This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.