Activities to Teach Students to Identify Sentence Fragments
Parallelism is an essential component of writing that involves using consistent grammatical structures in a sentence to make it easily understandable. Parallel structure improves clarity and readability of written work and reduces confusion for the reader. Therefore, teaching students how to identify sentences with parallel structure is important to help them write more effectively. Here are some activities that you can use to teach parallel structure to your students:
1. Sentence Combining Activity:
Provide your students with a set of simple sentences that could be merged to create a more complex sentence with parallel structure. Ask students to identify sentences that have parallelism and group them together. Encourage them to create complex sentences that contain parallel structure by joining the parallel sentences.
2. Sentence Matching Activity:
Prepare a set of sentences written on cards. Some of these sentences will have parallel structures, while others would not. The students need to identify the sentences that boast of parallelism, put them in one group, and those without parallelism, in the other group.
3. Identifying the Error:
Set up a few sentences that contain errors with the use of parallel structure. Ask the students to identify and correct the error. It is essential to give them some instruction on how to recognize parallel structure errors before they begin the activity.
4. Guided Writing Activity:
Model how to write sentences with parallel structure through guided writing. Choose a topic, create a sentence, and ask the students to improve it by using parallel structure. Provide feedback and ask students to create their sentences using parallel structure.
5. Team Competition Game:
Split the class into teams to play a competition game that highlights parallel structure. Provide the team with a sentence that is missing parallelism and ask them to correct the sentence by adding parallel structure. The team that answers correctly and fastest wins.
In conclusion, parallel structure is an important writing skill that all students should learn as a foundation for better writing. Each of these activities mentioned above is designed to engage students and teach them the basics of using parallel structure in writing. Through the integration of instructional activities, students can develop their skills in writing sentences with a more precise and concise structure.