Sentence Openers

Objectives

To identify and explore a variety of sentence openings.

Resources

Internet access | Familiar text to the student | Sentence Openers resources from Week 30 Lesson 2 | An image chosen by the student | Lined paper

Today's Lesson

Spelling

Review spelling words to prepare for your test at the end of the week. Use Spelling Frame Spelling Tiles and Type Itto learn this week's words.

PRACTISE - Spelling Frame

Main Activity

Today, your student will focus on using and applying their skills in opening sentences in different ways. Open a familiar text, e.g. a current story book, and look at a page at random. How many different ways of starting sentences are there on the page? Emphasise again that a good text, either fiction or non-fiction, will usually have lots of different sentence openers, to keep the reader interested.

Ask your student to choose a picture, either from the internet or from a book, to write a short passage about. The picture should be of interest to your student, and should give them some inspiration to write. It could be of a faraway land, under the sea, in outer space, in an imaginary world, etc.

When the picture is ready, discuss the setting and the things they see. Scribe (write) interesting words and ideas around the picture for your student, as they tell you about it. Ask:

Where is the place?
What is happening there?
What is behind the…?
What is to the left of the picture?
What is to the right of the picture?
Who lives there?

Now, you will focus on building in the sentence opener work. Look at the -ing verb openers you created together on plain paper last week.

You, as the tutor, model saying and then writing a sentence about the picture that starts with an -ing verb, e.g.:
- Running behind the tree, the frightened squirrel saw its chance to hide.
Your student then does the same.
Repeat the above two steps.

Then, look at the preposition openers you created together on plain paper last week.

You, as the tutor, model saying and then writing a sentence about the picture that starts with a preposition, e.g.:
- Above the clouds was a world that no one had ventured to.
Your student then does the same.
Repeat the above two steps.

As you work on this together, your student will be hearing, reading and writing sentences with two specific but different types of opener.

Read back the sentences together. How do they sound? Reflect together.

Citations

[1] spellingframe.co.uk