Rising Writers: A Creative Writing Starter Kit

Ever feel like your students’ writing is full of fragments, short choppy sentences, or endless strings of “and”? You’re not alone, and there’s a simple, evidence-based strategy that can help. Sentence combining is one of the most effective and engaging ways to strengthen students’ writing. Backed by the research of Bruce Saddler and the practical framework of The Writing Revolution, this approach helps students develop syntactic awareness, write more fluent and sophisticated sentences, and improve comprehension, all by actively manipulating language rather than memorizing grammar rules. In this hands-on session, you’ll experience sentence combining as your students would through five short, structured lessons aligned to Alberta’s English Language Arts and Literature curriculum. Using examples from the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, we’ll explore how to help students move from fragments to complete sentences, use adjectives and conjunctions to elaborate, and add sentence variety through appositives. You’ll leave with ready-to-implement lesson plans, classroom routines, and strategies you can use Monday morning to help your students write and think with greater clarity and confidence.