Gallery Walk and Mentor Texts

Today we studied subordinating conjunctions in English class. Sounds exciting, huh? If I had introduced the lesson as that, they would have revolted. People assume that just because I'm an English teacher, I love grammar. I don't. It's as big a pain in the butt to me as it is to my kids.

To start our conversation about subordinating conjunctions, I set up a gallery walk. I chose several sentences from different novels that use subordinating conjunctions. Their only instructions were to walk the room, read the sentences, and notate things that they notice and/or think of on post-it notes. Once they finished the walk, we talked about what they noticed. I pushed them to find what the sentences had in common. They noticed commas, a few literary devices, and that several sentences started with "if." So I introduced them to the AAAWWUBBIS.

AAAWWUBBIS is a mnemonic device for some of the most common subordinating conjunctions. According to Constance Weaver, it's also one of the most commonly assessed errors on standardized tests. I know I've seen it in my students' writing all year long--even in my seniors.

Once they knew what they were looking at, we were on a roll! We talked about punctuation and how using a period instead of a comma lead to fragments. We talked about removing the conjunction and making two short sentences. We talked about using conjunctions for sentence comining because the short sentences were "baby" sentences.

After theorizing why authors would use subordinating conjunctions, students went to other mentor texts--children's books. They mined those books for
sample sentences. Not every book will have them, but many of them will. We looked and shared aloud and broke the sentences apart and put them back together.

To sum it up, students worked in groups to write their own sentences with subordinating conjunctions.

We aren't done with subordinating conjunctions. As we work in literature circles, students will continue to look for them in their young adult books. We'll compile examples in group folders. We'll examine subordingating conjunctions in our own writing. We'll experiment with sentence combining.

And, hopefully, along the way, we'll remember how much fun writing can be. It's not all about correcting papers after all.