Triple Golden Sentences

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
Tryon Edwards

 

 

Why is it so difficult to teach children how to write?  It's a question that many have asked.  As a matter of fact, I was asked this question today by members of our school's leadership team.  They are trying to gather information explaining why our writing scores have dropped this past year.  Hmmm..... Why did they drop?

 

 

Was it the new mandated curriculum that we implemented that focused more on genre's than teaching technique?

 

Was it the new pace we were asked to maintain generating rushed pieces every week?

 

Was it the lack of time in our schedule as administrators and district coordinators fail to communicate honestly asking too much be taught with too little time.

 

I guess it doesn't really matter - we have to find a way to make it work and to teach kids how to write... enter WBT and the Triple Golden Sentence.

 

The Triple golden sentence is simple.  It's a method of helping students organize their verbal thoughts. 

 

Students will be asked to write a sentence with three distict points.  An example would be as follows:

 

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit Disneyland, Hollywood, and the beach.  They have to be completely seperate thoughts. Students then use their three ideas to begin the pattern.  They write one sentence about each of the three areas.  They conclude the paragraph restating their opening sentence.

 

With color coded strips, you would then show students that their second paragraph would be about Disneyland.  The third paragraph would focus on Hollywood and the fourth paragraph would discuss the beach. 

 

It seems like common sense but students really struggle staying on topic.  If they could see the color coded chart, then they could see it all falls back on writing one efficient triple golden sentence.

 

I've heard one fellow wibbetter suggest that the color coding might occur through sentence strips, allowing students to see the colored strips and place them in their correct positions.  Another option might be to provide scaffolding charts to help students see the connections.

 

By giving our students a method to organize their verbal thoughts, we aren't just  helping them be better writers but rather better thinkers.  Students have much to say, they are great thinkers but at times it's difficult to nail those thoughts down so they can share them in a logical methodical manner.  I'm excited to have another tool to help students improve and improvement equals success.