Week 8- Best Practices by Steve Graham, Charles A.

MacArthur, and Michael Hebert, chapters 10-11

Chapter 10 is about sentence construction. It discusses how children learning to translate

their thoughts into sentences is one of the most complex things they will learn. It talks about

sentence combining, which is the process of taking short sentences and learning to turn them into

one sentence. It also has instructional recommendations with real-world examples. It gives

several different examples of exercises, such as Cued exercises: offering a specific clue that

guides the student to combine sentences (short sentences are called “kernels”) in a specific way,

and open exercises: providing examples without any clues to guide the student. It talks about

ways to combine kernels such as inserting adjectives or adverbs, producing compound subjects

and objects, producing compound sentences with “and” and “but”, and more. It also talks about

how to judge correctness and measure improvement. Chapter 11 is all about planning, as in the

first step in the writing process. This chapter talks about self-regulated strategies and the

importance of genre structure, modeling (for example, modeling how to talk yourself through the

writing process using the TONES strategy), and understanding the writing requirements. It goes

on to discuss question asking (the journalist’s five Ws, the four Bedford questions, feasibility

questions, and evidence base questions). It also talks about commonly used approaches.

My biggest takeaway from chapter 10 was definitely the example section on sentence

combination. The learn-see-do structure is definitely something I will implement. It starts by

saying how and why combinations are made, then has scaffolded practice, and then the teacher

gives independent practice. I think this is a super effective way to teach a lesson like this and I

will write that down for future use! All of the examples and figures in chapter 10 were super

helpful to me. Another one I will definitely refer to in general was the large table (10.1) that had

all of the ways you could combine sentences. I think it would even be cute to turn this table into
a type of anchor chart to utilize when introducing this topic. In chapter 11, the section on

questions was really interesting to me. I will definitely remember some of those when hearing

questions from my own students. However the things I think I will use the most from this chapter

are all of the examples of how to first begin planning when choosing to write. It talked about

brainstorming, mind mapping, freewriting, outlining, and storyboarding. It also talked about how

to give instruction for each of these choices, and how it was evidence based. These are all great

suggestions and I think it would be cool to make students do every one at least once throughout

our writing journey. I really enjoyed seeing how they connected to the evidence based practices

as well, it’s always good to know they work!

These chapters were some of my favorite chapters yet. They offered so many great real

examples and things that I could actually see myself not only teaching but displaying around my

classroom or keeping in a professional binder. They tied to SRSD, evidence based practices, and

every other important thing we have read about so far. I really enjoyed these chapters.
 Works Cited

Graham, Steve, et al. “Chapters 6 and 7.” Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Guilford Press,

New York, 2019. Kindle Edition.