What is a sentence?

Before we can write a great paragraph, we need to learn what a good sentence looks like.  We've been doing lots of thinking about sentences.  We need to learn how to write interesting sentences to make our readers want to read our writing. 

This post is here so we can come back and revise our learning any time we want to.  

We are learning to (WALT): 
recognise and write different kinds of sentences

Sucess Criteria (SC): We can write different kinds of sentences correctly.

We can write a complex sentence beginning with a verb.

We’ve learnt that there are 3 kinds of sentences:

• Simple sentences
• Compound sentences
• Complex sentences

     And we are pretty good at writing simple and compound sentences already, but we've looked at these again to help us make comparisons with these and complex sentences.  Here's some of what we worked on.  

A simple sentence features:

Punctuation - Capital letter at the beginning and full stop at the end.  If it’s a question it has a question mark and if it is said with excitement, has an exclamation mark.

It contains one idea (clause) and has a subject, verb and object.

Daniel jumped off his bike.

Subject verb object

A compound sentence features:

Punctuation - Capital letter at the beginning and end punctuation.

It contains two ideas (clause) joined by a conjunction.

Daniel jumped off his bike     and pushed it up the path.

Subject verb   object conjunction  verb object                                                    

A complex sentence features:

Punctuation - Capital letter at the beginning and end punctuation.

It contains two or more ideas (clause/s) joined by a conjunction.

Running late for the game, Caitlyn jumped out of the car and ran for the court.

It contains two or more ideas or thought (clause/s) joined by a conjunction.

It contains 1 dependent clause and a complete, compound sentence.

Running late for the game, Caitlyn jumped out of the car and ran for the court.

Dependent Clauses: do not make sense on their own.  They need to be joined to another complete clause.

‘Running late for the game’, on it’s own does not make sense.  We are waiting for more to come to make it a complete sentence.

‘Caitlyn jumped out of the car and ran for the court’ is a complete thought and makes sense on it’s own.  It is a complete sentence so we can add the dependent clause to it.

Here are some examples of independent clauses (blue):

Tara ate a cheese roll after she watched the news.

(Tara ate a cheese roll is an independent clause. It works as a standalone sentence.)

My mother is originally from Wellington although now lives in Palmerston North.

I went for a run before my breakfast.   

Examples of Dependent Clauses (purple)

Tara ate a cheese roll after she watched the news.

(The clause after she watched the news is a dependent clause. It does not work as a standalone sentence.)

Even though his mother was a driving instructor, my cousin failed his driving test six times.

A computer once beat me at chess but was no match for me at kick boxing.

Writing a complex sentence beginning with a VERB

The ‘-ing’ sentence starter … beginning with a verb

Ambling along the path, Dante noticed something shining on the ground.

Your turn:

(this is where we all had a go at writing some sentences)

Word Study - 'sc' or 'sk' ?

Here's an example of some of the word study work we do in Room 4.

We've been discussing if we use an 'sk' or an 'sc' in words and how do we know which one to choose when they both can sound the same.  We began to write some 'sc' sounding words on our whiteboard and came up with a theory.  We were then able to organised these words into columns to show our thinking.  This is what we came up with. 

Room 4 Athletics

Congratulations to some of the Fantastic (room) 4 students for coming in the top 3 places at the athletics day. 

You guys are funny! I love your cheesy smiles :-D

Paradise

This is one of the songs we sung at the Room 3 & 4 Assembly.  Room 4 had great pleasure teaching the lyrics and sign language to Room 3 kids. Where we then were able to share it with you all.  Singing makes us feel happy, especially with such a lovley Kiwi song as this one. 

Just incase you want to keep practicing at home and Mums, Dads, Grandmas, Koros, Tipunas, Uncles, Aunties or anyone wants to learn this beautiful song, here it is!  A hyperlink to the youtube signing and the lyrics, are below. 

PARADISE

(Waimarie Smith) ©2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlHyZyUR4EA




In the morning, can you hear the tui call
Can you hear the tui call. Can you?
Then in the evening when the sun goes down
And the moon is out, hold my hand

Can we chill underneath this pohutukawa tree,
Life is a breeze like 1, 2, 3 ahuh. Come on
Let’s take a dip in the ocean and watch the sun‐set
Time is precious that’s what we forget oh no. It’s gone…

This is, where the taniwha was born
Where Maui drew his hook, my home
And no one can take this away from me
My land is a part of me till I’m old

Hold my hand and raise your glass to
Life in paradise, paradise
I can take you places people only dream of
But it’s all mine in paradise

Time is precious that’s what we forget
Time is precious that’s what we forget oh no, it’s gone
Time is precious that’s what we forget, time is precious, oh no, it’s gone

Term 2 Karakia

Here is our karakia we are learning for Term 2.  We are very lucky that one of our wonderful class mums has been coming in to help us with our pronunciation of Te Reo Maori.  We will practice some more in Term 3 till it's perfect. 

Here it is here if you want to keep practicing at home:

Circus Challenge

Wow, this was fun, learning how to do cool plate spinning and stick juggling.  We have some super circus kids in the making here, showing their resilience and curiosity in trying new skills.

Letter Writing and ANZAC Day

We had been learning to write letters.  We've been learning where the address goes, where to put the stamp, how to address who the letter is to and from and how to sign the letter at the end.

We had been learning about ANZAC day and had been reading some stories about the Gallipoli campaign.  We also read a great (but sad) book called Jim's Letters by Glyn Harper.  It's about two brother's who write each other letters during WWI. One brother is at home on the farm and the other is away at war on the front line, fighting.

We had to make some letters to pretend we were family members writing to each other during the war.  We first made some paper look really old by using coffee and tea stains, we got some old stamps images and then some nice poppy images to make our display and letters look like they had come from Gallipoli where the poppies grew.

Here are some pictures of our display.