Once I have taught my students some phonics skills, and they have an understanding of how to write words, I can start working on writing simple sentences for kindergarten. This is a big leap for students. They go from putting a couple of letters together to make a word to putting a few words together to make a whole sentence.
They need a whole variety of skills in place before they can get started on this:
Phonological Awareness
Understanding the difference between a letter, a word and a sentence takes some explicit practice with your students. I like to practice counting how many words my students hear in a sentence during our morning meetings. This helps them when they start writing sentences,
Sentence Rules
I also take the time to explicitly teach the different rules that are needed when we write a sentence: an uppercase to start the sentence, finger spaces, and punctuation marks. I go over these during whole group and small group lessons.
Simple Sentences for Kindergarten
My students also need time to practice! I don’t want to just throw them into the deep end and force them to write long sentences on their own. Instead, I like giving them some guidance so that they can practice the new skills they are learning.
I also want to differentiate the sentences I am giving them to write, they can be simple or more complex depending on their skill level.
Take a look at the Write a Simple Sentences for Kindergarten activity. This is perfect if you need an easy tabletop or guided literacy activity for your students:
