Do you have students with conjunction goals? Are you looking for other ways to teach Conjunctions to your students that you haven't already used time and time again? Or maybe you think your students could benefit from some complex sentence goals? Today we are talking about all of the above!
Why would we work on conjunctions!?
If you have students who are always utilizing simple sentences, chances are you would like to see them be able to use more complex or expanded sentences and understand them! Understanding complex sentences both verbally and written, will help students with reading and comprehension in the classroom.
How do we teach it differently?
If your students are already learning conjunctions and not getting them in the classroom, we need to find a way to teach them differently and explicitly.
McDonalds French Frys
One of my favorite words to start with is the word AND. I like to take a McDonalds french fry box and put simple sentences on strips of yellow paper for my “fries”. I will put things that my students like for the sentences such as “I like superheros” or “I like race cars” and then students can pull sentence stem fries and combine them with the word AND.
I use this same activity with other conjunctions as well such as Or, So, and But and use a visual to help them understand when the should use each conjunction.
Check out this visual from my coloring by conjunctions pack.
Elen's Epic or Fail
On the show Elen, she will show clips of viral videos and then pause the video part way through and the audience has to vote if they think the video will have an epic ending or a fail. I like to take a piece of paper and write Epic/And on one side and Fail/But on the other. My students watch the clip and if they think it will be epic, they will tell me what they think will happen with the word And in their sentence. So “The skier started skiing down the ramp and landed the jump.” Or if they think the video would be a fail they would say something like “The skier started skiing down the ramp but they wiped out on the jump”.
FANBOYS
Another way I like to work on conjunctions for students who are a little bit more advanced but could still use some work on complex sentences is to bring out a FANBOYS graphic (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). This will help them come up with more complex sentences and take their language and writing to the next level.
I hope you found these tips and ideas helpful and if you want more you can check out my Conjunctions Tic Tac Toe or my Color by Conjunctions in my Teachers Pay Teachers store and check out my YouTube video below.
