“Sentence composing provides acrobatic training in sentence dexterity. It uses literature as a writing school with a faculty of professional writers who virtually teach students to build better sentences.” - Don and Jenny Killgallon
Getting Started with Elementary School Sentence Composing introduces the powerful Sentence-Composing approach at a perfect time — elementary school — to give students a strong foundation in writing. Using real sentences by authors as models, the approach provides practice with four tools that skilled writers use to build strong sentences:
- Openers to vary sentence beginnings
- Splits to vary sentence middles
- Closers to vary sentence endings
- Mixes to add details in two or three places
Along the way, Don and Jenny Killgallon provide support for students, including:
- Basic sentence training – activities to understand subjects, predicates, and their roles in sentence building
- Broken sentences – exercises to identify, repair, and avoid fragments
- Vocabulary scaffolds – “quickshots” to include an immediate, clear definition in context for challenging words
