SENTENCE-COMPOSING TEACHER’S HANDBOOK (SENTENCE COMPOSING SERIES)

In thousands of classrooms within and beyond the United States, Don and Jenny Killgallon’s sentence-composing method has given students tools to become better writers. By focusing on the sentence, the Killgallons in their numerous textbooks for students–all levels, from upper elementary through college–changed the way teachers and their students look at language, literature, and writing.
Their first-ever book for teachers, SENTENCE-COMPOSING TEACHER’S HANDBOOK is a comprehensive resource for validating, teaching, varying, and assessing the sentence-composing method. The handbook can be used by itself or with any of the Killgallon’s sentence-composing student textbooks available from Heinemann Publishers or online through amazon.com. For teachers new to the sentence-composing method, this handbook is a valuable and useful introduction, including many classroom-ready student activities.

FOR YOUR STUDENTS: An affordable textbook titled STUDENT ACTIVITIES containing all student activities from the Teacher’s Handbook is available at half the handbook price.

HARRY POTTER AND THE SUPER SENTENCE contains those same student activities but with only sentences by J K. Rowling for additional practices. homework, or independent study.

The sentence-composing method originated by the Killgallons links grammar, writing, and literature through imitating sentences by authors. Unlike traditional grammar approaches that emphasize sentence dissection, the Killgallons’ sentence-composing method emphasizes sentence connection, teaching students connections between how authors build sentences and how they can learn to build sentences using the same tools. The method provides training in sentence structure through varied activities–matching, exchanging, unscrambling, combining, imitating, expanding, multiplying–using literature as a writing school with a faculty of authors teaching students tools for building better sentences.

IMITATION: THE FOUNDATION OF SENTENCE COMPOSING
Sentence imitating demonstrates that authors’ sentences have “architecture,” and that the structure of the sentence is its blueprint. With sentence imitating activities, students build their own sentences from the same blueprint with surprising ease.

Authors frequently, students infrequently, use a variety of tools in building sentences. The sentence-composing method teaches students to use the same variety of tools of authors in their own sentences. Just as infinitely varied music can be based upon just a few notes and chords, those sentence-building tools allow for the creation of an infinite variety of sentence structures.

Imitating the sentence-building tools of authors provides the how, but also enhances the what. With the focus on just one sentence at a time, through varied imitation activities, students succeed, sometimes astonishingly, in building sentences like authors in both structure and content.

CREATION: THE GOAL OF SENTENCE COMPOSING
Imitation and creation often complement each other: a sentence model by an author is both an end-point and a starting-point. Imitating sentences by authors, students borrow something (structure) and contribute something (content). As a result, students understand the link between imitation, the foundation of sentence composing, and creation, its goal. They learn the sentence-building tools of authors, simultaneously discovering their own significant voices as writers, and lastingly hearing the whispering of other voices–those of the authors of their model sentences, whose voices helped students discover their own.