How to Construct an Expanding Activity

If, for example, you have taught the appositive writing tool and students have had practices in which they unscrambled, combined, or imitated professional sentences illustrating effective appositives, then they are ready for an expanding activity.

Step One: Choose a professional sentence model containing a sentence composing tool you'd like your students to learn and practice. Model Sentence with Appositive
The gardener, the last one of Gatsby's former servants, came to the foot of the steps.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Step Two: Present Fitzgerald's sentence without the underlined appositive.

Model Sentence without Appositive
The gardener, ^, came to the foot of the steps.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Step Three: Have students insert an appositive at the caret mark, with content compatible with the context and writing quality of the model sentence.

Variation:

• In their own previous writing, ask students to find places where the same tool (in this case, the appositive) could be added to make the writing more effective.
• Perhaps students could exchange papers and identify those places, using a slash mark or some other indicator for the insertion of the sentence composing tool.
• After students have learned cumulatively more sentence composing techniques, slash marks could indicate places for expansion in their writing, with students deciding the appropriate sentence composing technique to use.