Description
Many programs teach students how to write different text types, like narratives, recounts and procedures. But all texts – regardless of their length and difficulty level – are composed of sentences. In our experience, many students (even in high school) lack the ability to link their ideas together and to express sophisticated thoughts and feelings in complex sentences.
In this 500+ page workbook, we teach students of all ages to write compound sentences featuring the FANBOYS coordinating conjunctions.
A compound sentence is made up of two, equally important, independent clauses joined using a coordinating conjunction or a punctuation mark (like a semicolon).
Compound sentences help students to connect their thoughts: to express multiple similar ideas, contrast ideas, link causes and effects, provide more detail, and to write more efficiently, with more variation and less monotony.
Students are expected to write compound sentences by Year 2. As soon as students can write simple sentences confidently, we teach them to write compound sentences with coordinating conjunctions.
The acronym FANBOYS (‘for’, ‘and’, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’, & ‘so’) – is a useful way to learn and remember coordinating conjunctions. But we don’t teach coordinating conjunctions in that order!
We start with the most useful and common conjunctions: ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, & ‘so’. Then, we teach students to use less frequent coordinating conjunctions, ‘yet’, ‘nor’, & ‘for’. In parallel, we teach punctuation conventions, such as placing a comma before the conjunction, as well as personal pronoun use.
In our workbook, we define compound sentences and explain the different functions of each coordinating conjunction. We then provide lots of scaffolded sentence models, sentence-combination practice, and independent practice to help students acquire and automate the skill.
This workbook is suitable for students learning English as an additional language; students with language and learning challenges; students who are being home-schooled; students who haven’t yet learned to write compound sentences for any reason; and reluctant writers.
The workbook is low pressure, and completely self-paced.
If you’d prefer to learn with scripted modules and writing scaffolds, audio and video demonstrations, a sequenced writing workbook, lots of guided practice opportunities using easy to spell words, and an explicit “I do, we do, you do” course structure, check out our FANBOYS Cup: How to Write Compound Sentences Self-Paced Video Course.
Looking for additional structured writing resources?
If you haven’t done so already, please check out other workbooks in the Think, Then Write Explicit Writing Program:
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- Think, Then Write Workbook 1: Simple Sentences
- Think, Then Write Workbook 3: Complex Sentences
- Think, Then Write Workbook 4: Paragraph Writing Foundations
- Think, The Write Workbook 5: Multi-Paragraph Information Report Writing Foundations
- Think, Then Write Workbook 6: Narrative Writing Foundations
- Think, Then Write Workbook 7: Persuasive Writing Foundations
