Change sentence structure to add story variety.

Around the Word in Eighty Ways

Humans are creatures of habit. We get used to doing things a certain way, and it's often hard to change. The point I will make here is that students develop the habit of writing sentences in which the subject is followed by the predicate. Once they are made aware of this trend, which makes sentences sound "sing-songy", they can usually take care of the issue by making a few minor adjustments in the sentence structure. One strategy to try is asking them to write or find sentences with a variety of sentence structures, using the parts of speech in different orders. Look for sentences opening with the following parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, objects of the preposition, etc.
Here is an example of a sentence playing Around the Word in Eighty Ways. Example: Adjective beginning--Sour pickles are what I love to eat early in the morning. Pronoun beginning--I love to eat sour pickles early in the morning. Verb beginning--Eating sour pickles is what I love to do early in the morning. Model starting this sentence some other ways, then look for several other sentences to try the concept with. It's amazing how simply changing sentence structure can bring creativity and variety to a story!
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Teaching kids to give presentations.

One of the easiest and most interesting ways for kids to learn how to give presentations involving bar graphs, line graphs, and pictographs is using the topics that interest them the most. Assign surveys for them to do with friends, family members, and classmates about what their favorites are and make a tally as the answers are given. Then they can convert their responses to whatever type of graph is most appropriate for the situation.
Here are some examples of favorites that could be graphed by your students in elementary and middle school: favorite food, color, pet, teacher, t.v. show, video game, clothes, movie, actor, singer, song, grade, book, place to visit, hobby, sport, season, dessert, animal, car, toy, board game, card game, restaurant, store, etc.
There are many more that the students will think of which would be interesting to your particular class. The choice is not as important as the integration of visual aids into the mode that is used to present information, especially as they move into the upper elementary and middle school grades. Colorful graphs really add clarity and depth to both written and oral presentations. This helps the visual learner, whether he's the one presenting or the one receiving the information. Most kids take pride in making a great visual.