2. Teach the Strategy with Fidelity

I am teaching this strategy to a group of mixed ability seventh graders. I push into this classroom every other day and co-teach with a special educator and a general educator, both trained in Fundamentals of Sentence Writing. I use the teacher manual to plan my lessons and deliver instruction through class participation and modeling. The students are eager learners, and they often share their knowledge and concerns. They have learned a great deal about parts of speech, sentence formation, and creative writing through the wonderful repetitive program. Repetition is what my students need the most. 

I first taught this strategy to middle school students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities, autism, and down syndrome in a self-contained setting. I taught the strategy to middle school students in a resource setting in a small group of 15 students, utilizing smart notebook to incorporate vocabulary instruction with the teaching of writing. I am currently teaching the strategy to small groups in the elementary resource setting. My current groups include 20 students in groups of one to ten students in kindergarten, third grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade.

My small group included four Tier 4 Special Education students that included one student with a learning disability, one with attention deficit disorder, one language impaired and one with a learning disability who was also an English Language Learner. Baseline data was taken in November 2015 to assess knowledge of sentence writing. Pre-test results indicated the students needed direct instruction in the fundamentals of sentence writing. I opted to teach this strategy lesson by lesson due to the deficits these students were experiencing in writing.  Their ability to construct a simple sentence was highly inconsistent.  Students were involved making a commitment to learning the strategy for correct sentence writing and each student began creating a writing folder.