Hello there. I hope you are having a fabulous week, and ready to dive into some practical evidence backed strategies that you can use when working on compound sentences with your students. So I have five tips for you today.

The first tip is to actually teach what a compound sentence is.

This is the first step with any of our skills but we wanna make sure that we provide our students with an initial explanation, but then also some visuals that they can use to understand what we're asking them to do. And then also to help with that generalization.

Some examples of visuals that I like to use. I have a intro little one pager that says what a compound sentence is, and it includes the conjunctions, the fanboy acronym.

That helps them know what a compound sentence is, and we're on the same page, I also have a little recipe card, that students can use when they are working on building sentences. It shows a visual of the sentence, the comma, the coordinating conjunction and the sentence, just a little graphic.

We have different versions of that. We have bigger sentence maps they can use with interactive cards and sentence starters to help them implement the strategies we're going to talk about. The visuals that I shared so far are just that introduction visual, different visuals to show the sentence structure.

I like to introduce specific conjunctions, because each conjunction has a different meaning. And, this can get really confusing for students. These conjunctions are a little bit more abstract, so I wanna make sure that I'm scaffolding that and helping them learn the different meanings of those conjunctions.

So we have little cards that include an icon to help them visualize the meaning of the conjunction. For "and" we would have a plus sign, for "but" we would have a lightning bolt. Each conjunction has a symbol that goes with it. And we have examples of sentences being used.

We also show the meaning of the conjunction. This is a really great way to introduce the conjunction. Like I said, the little icon cards and sheets for each conjunction with different examples, and it has all the visuals to help understand what that conjunction means.

That is strategy one. Having visuals to help break down complex concepts for students, especially the abstractness of the conjunctions. It really helps have some visuals for that. And then if you want access to these visuals, you can totally create your own. But if you want ready-made visuals, you can sign up for a free trial of SLP Now.

It's totally free. Just go to SLPnow.com/trial. And then you can create your free account. Go type in compound sentences on the materials page, and you'll have access to all of these visuals and other materials as well. Now let's move on to strategy number two, which is to teach sentence combining.

So we would start by giving students two independent classes or two simple sentences, and then model joining them with our target conjunctionI like to start with one conjunction, just so they get the hang of it, and then we might add in another one.

We do wanna give students opportunity to practice combining two simple sentences and getting a feel for how that works. There's different types of combining you can do.

You can do cued combining, where you give the students the two sentences and the, conjunction and they just have to literally put them together, or you can make it more complex where you just give them two sentences and they have to do that. Definitely check out the Strong article for more detail on the protocol for that.

On to strategy number three, we can also do sentence expansion and reduction. We can have students expand simple sentences, so we can give them one sentence and encourage them to make it into a compound sentence. Or we can identify compound sentences in our reading and break them down into the individual sentences.

And so that's just practicing breaking and putting sentences together, expanding them and reducing them is the technical term that, also has some evidence to support using that as a strategy.

Then strategy number four is to incorporate movement. If you have multiple students in your group, this is super fun.

in SLP Now our compound sentences skill pack has sentences or students can come up with their own. Let's say you have three students in the group. One of the students can act out the first sentence, and then the other student can act out the second sentence. And the third student can be the conjunction. They can choose the conjunction if you're giving them a field of conjunctions to choose from, or if you're just practicing with one, the student would hold that conjunction.

And maybe they can come up with a gesture. If it's "and" then maybe they just put their hands out and connect the idea between the two students.

So all three students are acting it out It really shows the meaning change and the power of conjunctions, and it gives that really meaningful practice, in that they're visualizing it, acting it out, their whole body is engaged in the activity.

The fifth strategy I want to leave you with is to collaborate with classroom teachers and think about generalization from the start.

Maybe you make a tiny version of the visual and put it on the student's desk or whatever the conjunction of the week is, you put that on the student's desk or binder and then they get extra exposure. You encourage them to use that in their writing or in classroom discussions.

So bringing the visuals into the classroom is an easy thing to do. You can also use text from the classroom as you're doing these activities, as inspiration for your sentence combining and sentence expansion and reduction activities.

So those were our five strategies starting with teaching and using visuals to break down the skill. Then we talked about strategy two sentence combining. Strategy three is sentence expansion and reduction. Strategy four was to incorporate movement and act out the sentences in conjunctions.

And then strategy five is to think about generalization. I'd love to hear which strategies you are using in your speech room. If you have any favorites, that I missed or if I shared your favorite or if there's a new one that you're trying, reach out to us on Instagram. We'd love to hear what you're up to.

That's a wrap. We'll continue this series and talk about more skills on the podcast going forward. I hope this was super helpful and that you have some new inspiration for how to target compound sentences with your students, or at least a boost of confidence, based on what you're doing already.

And then again, we have all of these visuals and practice activities and tools inside SLP Now. When you sign up for a free trial, you can download this skill pack and a few others completely free. I just want to help set you up for success and make your job as easy as possible.

Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.