Great Strategy to Help Students Revise Using Our Sentence Opening Sheet (SOS)

Our Best Labor Saving Device - The Famous Sentence Opening Sheet

Students often complain when they have to "revise" their first draft. In an extremely practical way, our Sentence Opening Sheet makes revision "concrete" since students can "see" their problems. Students complete the SOS sheet after writing their first draft. Often they will exchange them in a cooperative learning activity.

Sentence Opening Sheet

Copyright © The Stack the Deck Writing Program, Chicago, Illinois

Each column focuses on different writing problems.

Column #1 - Students list their first few words per sentence.

This helps them identify:

• repetitious sentence beginnings, e.g., The, And then, Then, I, etc.
• potential fragments, e.g., Because I fell off the bike.
• capitalization
• variety in sentence structures (fluency)

N. B. Column #1 reinforces our writer's vocabulary words of combining and rearranging.

Column #2 - Special - Pet Peeve

This column serves a variety of purposes.

• teacher pet peeve words (dead words), e.g., nice, stuff, thing, awesome, etc.
• shift in point of view from first person (I) to second person (you) to third person (he, she, it)
• word choice, e, g., students' listing their favorite colorful words in their story or listing specific words from their writing across the curriculum assignment.
• figures of speech: If the teacher has taught a mini-lesson on similes, for example, students can list their similes in the special column.

Column #3 - Verbs

• overuse of the same weak verbs, e.g., is, are, was, were, got, etc.
• verb tense inconsistency, shifting from past tense to present tense to past tense
• passive instead of active voice (for high school)

Column #4 - Number of words per sentence

• variety in sentence lengths
• short, choppy sentences that needs to be combined/rearranged
• extremely long sentences--potential run-ons

Students do not have to complete every column on the SOS sheet. Depending on the objectives for the assignment, the teacher can assign one column at time. Also, the SOS sheet can become extremely tedious. It does not have to be completed for each paragraph in each assignment or for every assignment.

After attending one of Herb Hrebic's session on revision at the Wisconsin State Reading Conference, Heidi Erstad, an instructional technology integration specialist from CESA # 1 in West Allis, Wisconsin, developed an "automated" Sentence Opening Sheet for students who compose with Microsoft Word or ClarisWorks to let the computer number sentences and put one sentence per line for revision purpose.

To help our valued customers, we are providing Heidi's revision strategy based on the Jessica's Adventure mini-lesson from Herb's session. Her strategy can be used with any student paper.

Let us know what you think. Our Sentence Opening Sheet first appears in Check the Deck.

Sentence Opening Sheet Adaptation from
Shorewood, WI

Sue Borkon, a sixth grade teacher from the Shorewood School District, changes the "Pet Peeves" column on the SOS Sheet for each assignment, i.e., spelling, misplaced columns, etc. Her students were amazed at the results when they completed the sheet. "Gee, I didn't use any interesting verbs" or "My sentences all begin the same." The Pet Peeves column allows the teacher to adjust to the needs of the class. Here's Sue Borkon's version:

That's All, Folks!