Improving sentence writing through writing warm-ups

Last year I wrote about improving our students' sentence writing through daily writing warm ups.

Over the teaching break I developed a term of writing warm ups that specifically related to our History content, which was the Industrial Revolution and Movement of People during the 18th and 19th centuries.

These warm ups are short exercises, which are to be conducted at the beginning of English/HASS lessons.

In English we are reading Tom Appleby: Convict Boy by Jackie French, so having vocab that relates to History can easily be transferred to English, as we study our text.

These writing warm ups and vocab lists can be found on the Explicit Instruction page here.

The intent behind this was to immerse our students in this time period and introduce them to some complex language that would certainly help them to better explain the significant events that occurred during this time.

Below are some examples of writing warm ups that our students write each lesson in their books.

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Today we completed our first essay of the year. Students attempted to use the knowledge and vocabulary gained through these writing exercises, to write complex sentences in their summative assessment. Their introductory paragraphs in particular were constructed well, using correct language and knowledge of the time period.