Falling Into First: Throwback Thursday: Sentence Buddy

So if you follow this little blog it probably sounds like I've been talking about moving and packing all the time.Well this is it - moving weekend! Everything needs to be out and into our temporary digs by Sunday so I literally have piles of stuff e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.

{The only things I have ready to go - ha!}

I PINKY PROMISE to have new posts to share just as soon as we make it through this weekend. I've already got them "penciled in" on the calendar. Thanks for baring with me!! Until then, thanks Cara for saving my hide and giving me something to blog about with yall. Today's Throwback Thursday is my most viewed post of all time - The Sentence Buddy Freebie! I'm thrilled by how many people love this little guy and all the awesome feedback it's gotten. It's a perfect beginning of the year writing activity, one your kids will refer back to all year long.

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Ok, so I'm a day late. But as promised I've uploaded my little Complete Sentence Buddy freebie!!

[Click the picture you grab your copy ]

We spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year talking about the parts of a complete sentence. Well I wrote the silly song below and my kiddos chanted along like champs! I'd over hear them singing the song to themselves later in the day during centers and recess and then even while they were writing....which got me thinking. I've always thought of sentence horizontally. I never really thought of it from a top down approach. But everyone has a head and everyone has feet, and this concept really seemed to make sense to me kiddos. So I grabbed a sentence strip and set to work onto making a concrete visual for them. Hence, the birth of the Sentence Buddy!

This is what our Sentence Buddies looked like at first. The kids kept asking me, "Where are his arms?" I explained we'd add the arms when we learned about the other two pieces of a complete sentence. So this week, we went back and added arms :)

Now I can easily have them refer to their sentence buddy when they are writing sentences, or if I want them to identify parts of sentences.The day after we finished our sentence buddies, I had them locate each part using the worksheet below. This is where the color coding came in handy! We put three little lines under the capitals in red, circle the punctuation marks in blue, underline the nouns in yellow, and box the verbs in green.