Wild Rose Learning

Try these formulas.

Many young students have trouble remembering or understanding sentence structure.

I had a student I was tutoring who kept writing sentence fragments because he kept forgetting that sentences needed a subject and a predicate; he was constantly writing sentences without subjects.

Every writing worksheet I gave him, there would be at least 70 percent of sentences that were written incorrectly.

I didn’t know how to teach him. But then I came across a piece of media (I forget if it was a video or text post) that showed a simple sentence formula.

Sentence Formula

The formula is: Sentence + Verb + Object.

(Or: S + V + O.)

Before this, I never thought about writing sentences with formulas. I just thought there were writing rules and sentence structures.

But I saw this and had an Eureka moment.

In our next session, I wrote the formula down on a whiteboard and gave him a piece of paper with nouns and verbs on it. I told him to use the formula and words to make sentences.

The first word was “Lion” and the example I gave him was:

The lion ate food.

“Do you understand what to do?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“Okay, now write your own sentences and if you need help, just ask.”

20 minutes later, he raises his hand and tells me he’s done.

To my surprise, he wrote complete sentences for all of the words.

“I think I’m onto something,” I thought to myself.

I continued to give him these assignments and made it more difficult each time. 

Instead of just telling him to use the sentence formula, I also told him to add more details to make his sentences longer and more descriptive.

For example, if he wrote, “The lion eats Bob,” I would ask him, “Why did the lion eat Bob?” He’d answer me and then I’d tell him to add that detail to his sentence.

Here’s how I taught him to write it: “The lion eats Bob because he is hungry.”

Question Formula

Once he got the hang of writing sentences with the formula and adding details to it, I taught him how to write questions with these formulas:

• Do + Subject + Verb?
• Are + Subject + Adjective?

“I want you to write questions using these formulas. Here are some examples,” I told him.

• Do you dance?
• Are they big?

I gave him a list of subjects to use and had him write questions.

At first, he only used the first formula, so I had to tell him to redo the assignment using the second formula.

After he re-did his work, he understood how to use both formulas.

Now, I just give him worksheets with word prompts on them and have him write sentences with the two formulas.

Final Thoughts

So, if you have a young student who is having trouble writing sentences and questions, try teaching them these formulas.

Also, if you want additional help, I have English Language Arts workbooks for grades 3 to 9 that you can check out.

They cover everything from parts of speech to sentence writing to reading comprehension. You can learn about them here.