Starting Out with Sentence Stems

When I first began my journey as a 5th-grade teacher, I held a misconception about students’ abilities in writing. I thought they could easily articulate their thoughts orally and in writing. Boy, was I off the mark. While a handful of students could express themselves clearly, most needed structural assistance.

Enter the solution: sentence stems. Sentence stems are effective tools for helping students express their thoughts, assisting students with special needs, and establishing focus during our lessons.

3 Tips for Using Sentence Stems

1. Make sentence stems optional.

I’ve found that the students who need sentence stems KNOW they need them and will use them.  As students become more comfortable explaining their thinking, many will naturally use the sentence stems.

2. Model using sentence stems when responding in notebooks and aloud.

Students may be unfamiliar with sentence stems and unsure how to use them effectively. Model your expectations and how sentence stems can be helpful to anybody!  Have students practice using sentence stems when answering questions with a partner. Start with simple examples like “My favorite subject is ___ because ___.”

3. Keep a list of sentence stems handy for you and your students to reference.

Sometimes my brain hurts, and I need sentence stems within easy reach. I made a printable list of science sentence stems for students to keep in notebooks!

I hope this post has sparked some ideas on how you can incorporate sentence stems into your teaching approach!

Pick up this printable (and more!) in Setting Up Your Science Notebook, available free to Science Penguin email subscribers in the Free Resource Library

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  • notebook set-up checklist
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13 thoughts on “Starting Out with Sentence Stems”

  1. Ari, thanks for sharing this! I have several other sets of sentence stems that I have started trying to incorporate, and this will be helpful since it gives some specific ones for science.

    Also, I wanted to let you know I am going to start using vocabulary folders in the spring. I was absolutely determined that all their vocabulary was going to be part of their regular interactive notebooks, but it doesn’t work well. We end up with blank right-side pages (or left-side pages, sometimes), and don’t go back often enough to really use the vocab. I feel like having a separate folder would hold me more accountable for practicing vocabulary more often.

    Thanks again!

    Reply
  2. I am a homeschooler and this will be our first year using interactive notebooks. Your site has the most useful information I have found. Thank you for the wonderful tips and resources.

    Reply
  3. Your blog and resources look great, but I really wanted your sentence stems, and they’re not there!
    Please contact me if I can get a copy!

    Reply

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