Teacher Approved Tips: Making a Time Filler Kit and Building Sentence Writing Skills [episode 68]

Emily
Hey, there. Thanks for joining us today for teacher approved tips, a special series from the Teacher Approved podcast. Every Thursday, we’ll be bringing you a weekly bonus episode, highlighting new and favorite tips that you can apply in your classroom today.

Emily
Our first teacher approved tip is make a time filler activity kit. Heidi, what is the time filler activity kit?

Heidi
Well, I know it is going to be a surprise. But a time filler activity kid is a file of ready to go activities that you can pull out at any time you find yourself with some unexpected time to fill in your classroom.

Emily
I can easily think of a dozen reasons why you might find yourself with unexpected free time on any given school day.

Heidi
Right like think of all the times that PE or music gets canceled because the teacher is sick, and there’s no sub. Or you get back early from a field trip and you still have an hour left in your day.

Emily
So to make your time filler kit, you need to decide first what kind of container you want to use. You could use a binder or my first inclination would be to use one of those portable file boxes that holds hanging file folders and has like a handle on the top. I love those for a kit or a magazine box would probably work well too.

Heidi
Then it’s time to start making a list of activities that you could do to fill 30 to 60 minutes with your students. Some ideas are writing prompts, an easy art project or craftivity, math color by numbers, fun picture books, brain teasers, really, the possibilities are endless.

Emily
Your goal should be to find activities that are fun, but still have some educational value, and that will require very minimal prep and supplies. If you have space, making the copies and gathering the supplies you need for the activity, really help when you’re ready to use the activity.

Emily
But worst case scenario, you just keep copies of the masters you need and a detailed list of exactly what supplies you need, and where they are.

Heidi
Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes, it’s just not realistic to have all of the supplies already prepped, unless your containers ginormous.

Heidi
But you could definitely pull together a simple art activity fast on the day you need it just by having the activity written out in advance. And having a list of exactly where to grab your paper and the colored pencils and all of the glue bottles that you’re going to need.

Emily
Yeah, the moment will be less chaotic if you have a nice list to follow to remind you where you might keep all those items. You will be so glad to have these activities handy when you need them. And then the real key is that you have to give yourself permission to use them.

Heidi
Oh, absolutely.

Emily
I can totally see myself being so delighted to know I have this kit ready to go that I never want to actually use it in case I need it later. We’ve talked about that before how when you save something till the special moment, no moment is ever special enough. So don’t fall into that trap.

Emily
If you need to remind yourself that these moments are exactly what you prepared for and grab those activities, you can always add more activities later.

Heidi
And preparing a time filler file is exactly the sort of painless prep idea that we referenced in our episode that came out last Monday. Will doing this make or break your teaching next year? No. But sometimes you just don’t have the energy to tackle a big project in the summer.

Heidi
So an easy prep project like this can be an approachable way to get some school tasks completed during the summer without feeling like you have to take on all of your tasks at once.

Emily
Oh yeah, you know that feeling?

Heidi
Yeah, so just get a container, start your idea list and then start prepping your activities.

Emily
And doing a small task like this may help you feel more confident and ready to tackle other back to school tasks as well. Maybe ones that will move the needle a little more. We would love to hear your ideas for time filler activities over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily
Our second teacher approved tip today comes from our friend Sara Marye from The Stellar Teacher Podcast. Let’s have a listen.

Sara
Hey there. This is Sara Marye and I’m the host of The Stellar Teacher Podcast and the creator behind The Stellar Teacher Company. And I am thrilled that Heidi and Emily invited me on to share a teacher approved tip with you.

Sara
But before I get into my tip, let me ask you guys a question. Do you have students who struggle with sentence writing? Now, regardless of what grade you taught, I bet that you have students in your class that can’t write a complete or coherent sentence.

Sara
I know that even when I was a fourth grade classroom teacher, I had plenty of students in my classroom who struggled with sentence writing. Yet, I was expected to get those same students who struggled with sentence writing to write a five paragraph essay by the end of the year. Talk about a teacher challenge.

Sara
Well, one of the best and easiest ways to help your students become stronger writers is to prioritize sentence level instruction and practice in your classroom. So my tip for you is to make time for at least one sentence writing activity every single day.

Sara
And this is important because sentences are at the heart of all writing. If a student can’t write a decent sentence, then there’s very little hope that they will write a decent paragraph or anything longer.

Sara
So from a practical standpoint, like I said, you want to spend at least you know, the first three to five minutes of your writing block, to focus on sentence level activities on a daily basis. And maybe you’re wondering, okay, but what exactly does that look like? Well, I’m so glad you asked.

Sara
There are a ton of different sentence level activities that you can regularly incorporate into your writing instruction, and you can do with your students. And these activities can work great as a warm up to your writing block, or there even something that you could incorporate into a literacy center.

Sara
And these activities are going to help students develop their understanding of sentence structure, and reinforce their ability to recognize and write complete, detailed and interesting sentences, which is something that we all want for our students. So let me share a couple ideas with you.

Sara
One sentence level activity that you could do with your students is what I like to call find and fix a fragment. And fragments are a bit of an epidemic in upper elementary and probably in lower elementary too. So to help students become much more automatic in their ability to recognize fragments, you want to give them practice.

Sara
And an easy way to do that is to write three sentences on the board, make sure at least one of them is a fragment, and two are actually complete sentences. And it can be helpful if all three of the sentences are related to the same topic and appear to be the same length, then have your students identify the fragment.

Sara
But once they find the fragment, we want them to fix it and turn it into a complete sentence. And this is a great time to bring in the conversation about what a complete sentence is, and helping students to understand that a complete sentence is an independent clause that has a noun phrase and a verb phrase.

Sara
And we want students to be able to recognize when a sentence is missing one of these important components. And if students get regular practice with finding and fixing fragments in other people’s writing, then they’re eventually going to be able to find and fix fragments in their own writing, or hopefully avoid them altogether. So that’s one activity you could do with your students.

Sara
Another one is to combine sentences. And we want students to be fluid in their ability to adjust and modify the ideas in their writing. And sometimes this is going to require them to combine ideas from two sentences and form a single sentence.

Sara
And this is really going to help students develop their ability to write more complex, interesting sentences. And so combining sentences might be taking two simple sentences that you give your students and see if they can combine the simple sentences to form a sentence with a compound subject or a compound predicate.

Sara
For example, you could give them the two sentences, Hannah played tag at the park and Jackson play tag at the park. And when we combine them, we get Hannah and Jackson played tag at the park, which is a simple sentence with a compound subject.

Sara
Or we can help our students understand that we can combine two simple sentences into a compound sentence. For example, Hannah went to the park, she played tag with her friends. We can have our students combine these sentences into Hannah went to the park, comma, and she played tag with her friends.

Sara
That sentence is a compound sentence using the conjunction and it’s a skill we want our students to develop. We can also have our students combine sentences by taking two simple sentences and turning them into a complex sentence.

Sara
For example, it was raining, Marco still went for a run. When we combine them we can get the sentence. Although it was raining comma, Marco still went for a run. And that sentence is a complex sentence starting with a subordinating conjunction although.

Sara
And if students get practice combining simple sentences into compound complex sentences, they’re going to start to understand all of the options that they have when it comes to combining sentences. They have so many more options that are going to allow them to communicate the ideas in their writing.

Sara
Okay, so my last one I’m going to share with you is expanding sentences. And this one might be one of the most practical sentence writing activities you can do with your students. Think about how many of your students struggle to add details to their writing. Even if a student can write in complete sentences, chances are that their complete sentences are all pretty simple and basic.

Sara
So to help students understand how to write more detailed sentences, we want to teach them how to expand their sentences. And an easy way to do that is to teach students to use the basic five w question stems to help them craft and expand a sentence.

Sara
So we’re going to start with a question who their answer might be my friend Maria was or is doing. My friend Maria likes to draw what my friend Maria likes to draw dinosaurs, when, when she gets home from school, my friend Maria likes to draw dinosaurs, where, when she gets home from school, my friend Maria likes to draw dinosaurs in her craft room.

Sara
With this super simple activity, students are going to learn how to take a simple sentence like my friend Maria likes to draw, and they’ll be able to expand it to get much more detailed and interesting sentences.

Sara
And if you found this teacher tip helpful, and want to learn even more sentence writing activities, as well as other writing routines that will help you effectively teach writing, let me invite you to sign up for my free exclusive podcast, The Confident Writer System Series.

Sara
And in this free podcasts series, I’m going to share with you the five mistakes that teachers make when teaching writing. And of course, I’m going to share with you how to avoid them. I’m also going to share simple routines for paragraph writing and sentence writing. And I’ll also give you ideas on manageable ways that you can teach writing every single day.

Sara
And you’ll also get access to some free resources like a sentence writing routine, and a paragraph writing routine that will help you teach writing to your students. You can sign up for this free podcast series at stellarteacher.com/writingpodcast. That’s all one word stellarteacher.com/writingpodcast. And I hope you found this tip helpful and are excited to finally help your students master the skill of sentence writing.

Emily
I love this tip. It’s such a great way to make sentence writing practical and doable every day. And the ideas she shared are sure to engage your young writers.

Emily
Some of my own children need to work on sentence writing, so I’m going to implement these ideas at home this summer too, because they’re so doable, like none of them are going to take too much time and they actually sound pretty darn fun.

Heidi
You can connect with Sara Marye at @thestellarteachercompany on Instagram. And be sure to listen to her fabulous podcast The Stellar Teacher Podcast. This is a show I love to listen to and we were lucky enough to be guest on her show earlier this year. And we know that you will want to add her podcast to your listened list.

Emily
And definitely make sure you sign up for that special private podcast she’s running right now called The Confident Writer System Series. I love a private podcast and I’m always looking to learn more about teaching writing so I’m signing up too.

Heidi
That’s it for today’s episode. Consider working on your time filler kit this summer and remember Sarah Marye’s teacher approved tip to make time for at least one sentence writing activity every day.