How to Help Kids Move Past Writing Choppy Sentences with Sentence Combining Activities

Choppy sentences are a natural part of the writing process. It’s how we all begin as young writers, relying on short, repetitive sentence structures because we’re still learning how to organize our thoughts on paper. When we’re first starting out, we know what we want to say, but not yet how to smoothly connect all of those ideas in writing.

So, choppy sentences aren’t a “problem” to fix, but rather a starting point. And we as teachers and parents get to be the ones to help our kids get to the next stage of writing! It simply starts with giving them the right tools. In this case, I’m talking about skill-specific instruction on combining sentences, particularly using coordinating conjunctions. It might sound a little dry, but it doesn’t have to be! Here are some of our favorite ways to help kids move past writing those choppy sentences.

Why Choppy Sentences Happen (and Why That’s Okay!)

Choppy writing usually shows up as several short sentences in a row, repetitive sentence starters, and ideas that might feel disconnected (even if they’re related).

Students have plenty of creativity and ideas, but they haven’t yet developed the tools to link all of those ideas together. Teaching them how to combine their short sentences gives them one of those tools, and it’s amazing how quickly it leads to them writing much more varied sentences!

What Sentence Combining Really Teaches Kids

It’s more than a grammar exercise! Teaching kids to combine sentences helps them recognize which ideas belong together and how they’re connected. This leads to sentences that sound more natural, fluent, and conversational.

As part of the revising process, the focus here isn’t on correcting errors but helping students build better sentences.

Start Small: Teaching Coordinating Conjunctions 

Before asking students to revise their own writing, it helps to explicitly teach coordinating conjunctions in a simple, focused way. If your students keep a writing interactive notebook, a simple FANBOYS foldable or notes section is a good place to start. But instead of glossing over all 7, I like to start with two or three a day, discuss each one’s purpose, and give examples. We might start the lesson with the most common:

• and (adds information)

• but (shows contrast)

• so (shows cause and effect)

  
  

Then, we’ll see these in action with a few sample sentences:

I wanted to play outside. It was raining.

I wanted to play outside, but it was raining.

When students understand why a conjunction is used, they’re much more likely to use it correctly in their own writing.

Hands-On Sentence Combining Practice

Hands-on activities make sentence structure click, and practicing this skill using sentences someone else wrote is often a gentler way to start than having them work on their own sentences. This is one of my favorite ways to practice sentence combining, and we’ve created a simple, no-prep downloadable activity here you can use with your students!

All you need is two short sentences on individual strips of paper and a set of coordinating conjunction cards. Students can physically manipulate the sentences and experiment with different combinations to see which conjunction makes the most sense when combining two short, choppy sentences.

This is especially effective for your visual and kinesthetic learners. One tip I have is to have students read both the original and combined sentences out loud. Hearing the difference really helps reinforce how combining sentences improves the flow!

Build Confidence with Multiple-Choice Sentence Combining

Another simple way to practice sentence combining is through multiple-choice task cards. This keeps the focus on understanding sentence flow without the pressure of writing their own sentences from scratch just yet.

Using Combining Sentences Skill-Specific Task Cards, students practice choosing the best way to combine two related sentences using a coordinating conjunction. My favorite ways to use these are in literacy centers where students work together to answer the questions on combining sentences, or as a whole-group “Scoot” activity where we tape these around the room, then students get 20-30 seconds at each card before a timer goes off to “scoot” to the next card.

Remember, this is all about recognizing what smooth sentence combining looks like before they try applying it to their own writing!

Apply Sentence Combining Through Revising and Editing Paragraphs

Once students can identify well-combined sentences, it’s time to move into some real revising! This is when I like to pull out the Combining Sentences Revising and Editing Passage! Instead of working with individual sentences, students revise a short passage here that includes a few choppy sentences. This helps them see how combining sentences improves the overall flow of a piece of writing.

This step is the bridge between practice exercises and applying the skill to their own writing. Once they’ve identified and revised choppy sentences in others’ writing, tackling their own paragraphs usually doesn’t feel as daunting. By now, they’ve seen and heard over and over how this is not about correcting “mistakes.” They haven’t done anything “wrong” by writing choppy sentences, but they now have a new tool to improve the flow of their writing.

Remember: Choppy Sentences Are a Sign of Growing Writers!

Students all start out writing choppy sentences. It’s part of the process, just like our first spoken sentences are short and basic too! Those short sentences show that ideas are forming, and practicing sentence combining gives students the tools they need to shape those ideas into clear, confident writing.

With consistent practice using coordinating conjunctions, students can move past choppy writing and begin crafting sentences that truly reflect what they’re thinking. 

Click the images below to find these downloadable, no-prep activities on Teachers Pay Teachers!