Good Writing Lesson

For those of you preparing for upcoming writing tests--or just trying to help students improve their writing, here's a lesson I did recently that worked well with 5th graders.  I gave each student a rubber band (and led them through a group promise not to misbehave with them!).  I read through a rather bland piece of writing with little to no sentence variety.  When I re-read it, I asked students to hold the rubber bands between the thumb and index fingers of both hands.  I told them I would pause at the end of each sentence.  They were to judge whether the sentence was short/simple, medium length, or complex/longer and stretch the rubber band to reflect the length of the sentence.  For the first text, their bands stayed about the same unextended length.  Then, I read an interesting piece to them, and we repeated the activity.  This time, we all observed the bands extending and retracting constantly.  The lesson made sentence fluency and variety more concrete and visual for these students. They discovered that you don't want all long or all short sentences in a piece of writing.  Then, they looked over their own compositions, stretching the rubber bands to see how varied their sentences were.  Many discovered that they needed to revise!  Hallelujah! Let me know if you try this.