Writing Trait/Strategy:
word choice; organization; revision
Mentor Text Suggestions:
Cow by Jules Older
One Dark Night by Lisa Wheeler
When a Monster is Born by Sean Taylor
The Other Dog by Madeline L’Engle
Description:
Do you have students who begin every sentence with “And then…” or students who begin every sentence the same way as this student did?
These are writers who need a mini-lesson on transition words or “glue words”—those words and phrases that hold a piece together and help the reader navigate smoothly through the text. In Super Story-Writing Strategies and Activities, Barbara Mariconda calls these transitions “red flags” that tell the reader that there is a shift in the plot.
Have students begin a list of “glue word and phrases” like the one below to which they can refer when they are writing. When I encounter a child during a writing conference who seems to use the same transitional words repeatedly, we circle those words, refer to our chart, and find some suitable replacements.
- After…
- After that…
- Afterward…
- At first…
- At the same time…
- A moment later..
- Before…
- Before I knew it…
- During…
- Earlier…
- Finally…
- First…
- For now…
- For the time being…
- In the blink of an eye…
- In the meantime…
- In time…
- In turn…
- Just as I realized…
- Later…
- Later on…
- Meanwhile…
- Next…
- Now last…
- Often…
- Second…
- Simultaneously…
- Sometimes…
- Soon…
- Suddenly…
- The next step…
- The next thing I knew…
- Then …
- Third…
- While…
For an extensive list of transitional words and phrases, go to the following website:
Study Guides and Strategies
Try retyping a portion of a published text omitting the transition words. Copy onto a transparency and work together to fill in the transitions. Examine the original text to see how the class transitions compare with the author’s.
