Existing material from books and magazines provide an opportunity to show a student how imagination and personal style play a large role in creating sentences and stories. Find an appropriate passage and tell your pupils to rework the words into their own version. Children with a basic knowledge of sentence elements can use this activity to learn how to restructure sentences, apply synonyms and antonyms, and create a cohesive paragraph while expanding on their growing grammar skills.
"Showing" sentences are important in developing critical-thinking abilities. Provide your students with worksheets containing a list of "telling," or nondescriptive sentences, followed by a space to turn each one into a showing sentence, which recreates the sentence with more detail and emotion, and incorporates the five senses into the revision. Students are typically more responsive to engaging activities such as these that allow them personal freedom to create their own work.
Using a visual motivator is another way to get a student thinking about forming a practical set of sentences that mesh well together and tell a brief story. Show them an image of an animal or person, and provide information regarding what the subject is feeling, thinking and seeing. Let the students extrapolate on the basic information and write a set of descriptive sentences detailing the subject's actions and emotions, how they handle them, and the end result.
Many writing assignments are seen by students more as obligatory work than free expression, and as such may discourage attention to details such as sentence formation and proper story development. Joint narratives allow for mutual participation in a free-form activity with minimal pressure to perform specifically for a grade. Write a short opening paragraph of a story and pass it around to each student, allowing them to add to it as they see fit. Pupils will have the chance to observe their peers' writing and practice using sentences in a growing work that warrants attention to the information as a whole.