#4129. Slinky City

Reading/Writing, level: all
Posted Sat Mar 15 16:02:04 PST 2008 by Kim Clayton (Kim Clayton).
Oakview Elementary, Ashland, Unitied States
Materials Required: Slinkys
Activity Time: 40 minutes
Concepts Taught: Demonstrating Sentence Fluency

How do you teach the idea of sentence fluency? With slinkys of course! Choose a passage that has choppy sentences of the same length and a passage that has a variety of sentence lengths. Next, provide students with slinkys. I purchased these in the party favor section of a store. Have students stand by their chairs as the teacher reads the choppy passage. Students stretch their slinkys to match the sentence length of the sentences. They should see in a visual way how their slinky's lenght remains constant. Next, teacher reads the passage with varying sentence lengths. Students stretch slinkys, visually seeing how the lenght differs with each sentence. This is a great activity for students who are both visual and kinesthic learners.