Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

09.22.17 Art of the Sentence: Brittany Rumph’s Kindergartners Can Really Write!

We love the technique Art of the Sentence.  By asking students to write a single sentence- ideally by asking them to write that sentence about some rich and engaging area of content- we teach them to master the art of syntactic control- the ability to use diverse tools to express complex ideas and this is extremely…


07.06.17 John Costello’s New Art of the Sentence Insights

Yesterday I shared Maggie Johnson’s thoughts about a great bit of writing instruction in Gabby Woolf’s classroom.  The connection to the amazing sentence-development work of Judith Hochman also struck my colleague John Costello. He reflects further on it in this guest post: Here at TLaC towers we love observing teachers who focus on sentence-craft to build…