Note: I started these musings on Monday, I just didn’t finish them then.

I didn’t know very much about GLAD strategies before the beginning of this semester. For all I knew, it was a set of strategies teachers from elementary schools received training for. So as a secondary teacher, I put it out of my mind. And then I was paired up with a professor to interview preservice teachers who had attended her GLAD training last semester. Naturally, I had to learn more about these strategies to better conduct the interviews. This guide (PDF) was super helpful.

One of the Common Core State Standards asks students to write with varied sentence structure. This can be challenging for students for whom writing does not come easy. So I decided to have a little fun with it and the Sentence Patterning Chart from the GLAD Protocol.

According to the protocol, each part of speech in the Sentence Patterning Chart has a color. Instead of working with colored markers, however, I gave my students colored pieces of paper. We wrote out our sentences, one part of speech at a time, then stood across the front of the classroom to share our sentences. To demonstrate to my students that sentences didn’t have to sound the same,  we physically moved ourselves around, rereading sentences and determining whether or not they sounded like English syntax. It was fantastic.

Now, they’re writing stories and paying attention to the patterns of their sentences. Walk around my classroom while they’re writing, and you’ll hear students talking about how if they’re going to start a sentence with an adverb, it’ has to be a word that ends in -ly and should describe how their character is doing something.

It is an exciting time in my classroom right now. Lots of thinking happening. And that’s always a good thing.