Sentence fluency begins with recognizing and understanding parts of speech, such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections and conjunctions. Third-grade students can identify the parts of speech for each word in a sentence on the worksheet. Have students work in pairs or small groups as you rotate in the room. After students complete the worksheet, review the worksheet as a class. Alternatively, identify the usual part of speech for individual words, such as “house,” “move,” “in,” “beautiful” and “slowly.” Follow up the lesson with worksheets students can complete individually.
Readers determine the meaning of a sentence based on the structure of the sentence as it breaks down into parts, such as the subject, verb, object, prepositional phrase, adverb, predicate nominative and predicate adjective. During whole class time, identify sentence parts and discuss how each part defines the sentence meaning. Diagram sentences to clarify the sentence parts. Direct each student to write 10 sentences and trade them with a partner. The students diagram the sentences written by the partner.
When reading passages of text, each sentence in a paragraph contributes to the meaning of the paragraph. Students learn to identify which sentence contains the main idea and which are supporting statements. Students arrange three to four sentences relating to a single subject into meaningful paragraphs so the reader can quickly identify the main idea. Alternatively, assign each student to write a paragraph with three to five sentences that clearly relate to a main idea. Students can then combine paragraphs to make a short journal article or story with a definite beginning, middle and end. Have student volunteers share their article or story with the class.
Understanding words, sentence parts and structure help students use context clues to decode unfamiliar words. Explain that students can read a sentence and paragraph and use the meaning they understand to guess at the meaning of a new vocabulary word in addition to using phonics and affixes to decode the word. Provide sentence examples using new vocabulary words, and ask volunteers to guess at the unfamiliar word’s meaning. For example, using the sentence, “The apparition floated above the floor and passed through the wall,” students may determine that an apparition is a ghost based on the action of floating and passing through the wall. Additional sentences in a paragraph may provide more clues that confirm the guess or the student may look the word up in a dictionary to verify the definition.