How to Construct an Imitating Activity

Step One: Choose a professional sentence model containing a sentence composing tool you'd like your students to learn and practice. Write an imitation of the model, and then scramble it for your students to unscramble. The unscrambling activity familiarizes students with the sentence parts, and the overall structure of the model and your imitation, and greatly helps them to write their own imitations.

Model Sentence with Appositives

Stuart decided that he needed advice on such an important matter, so he started uptown to find his friend Dr. Carey, the surgeon-dentist, owner of the schooner Wasp. (two appositives),

--E.B. White, Stuart Little
Your Imitation

Sally believed that she lacked skill on the balance beam quick turn, so she left the gym to seek her mentor Bill Harvey, the new coach, winner of an Olympic bronze medal.

Sentence Parts - Original Order

  1. Sally believed
  2. that she lacked skill on the balance beam quick turn
  3. so she left the gym
  4. to seek her mentor Bill Harvey
  5. the new coach
  6. winner of an Olympic bronze medal
Step Two: List the sentence parts in scrambled order. It is this scrambled list that is presented to students to unscramble.

  1. the new coach
  2. that she lacked skill on the balance beam quick turn
  3. to seek her coach Bill Harvey
  4. so she left the gym
  5. Sally believed
  6. winner of an Olympic bronze medal
Step Three: Ask students to unscramble the sentence parts to match the professional model (in the example above, the sentence from Stuart Little).

Step Four: After the unscrambling, now with two model sentences identical in structure (the original and your imitation), have students write their own imitations, first as a class, then in partners, and then individually. First, show them the two identical models. Have lots of students read their imitations aloud so that the same pattern of sentence structure is reinforced in students' understanding. Reading aloud many imitations of the same model is also a way for students to self-assess: they'll know if their imitation is acceptable. If theirs don't approximate the ones being heard, they can revise so that they do.

Students quickly learn sentence imitating, perhaps because they are so adept at imitating as a peer response and, since childhood, as a learning tool.

Sentence imitating teaches students that sentences have "architecture", and that the structure of the sentence is its blueprint. Students can use the same blueprint to build sentences with architecture similar to the architecture of the model sentence.

Students quickly learn to read such blueprints. Once students have a clear understanding of how to imitate a model sentence, they will be able to imitate sentences with minimum guidance--just a model sentence and directions, preferably like these:

"Study how the model is built, and then imitate it, part by part, so that your own sentence is more or less like the model." Or more simply, "Now write your own sentence--built kind of like the model."

And they will.

All of the published sentence composing materials include many similar activities, including the variations.

  • How to construct an unscrambling activity
  • How to construct a combining activity
  • How to construct an expanding activity