In fourth grade, students learn to use a variety of sentence
structures in their narratives, summaries, responses to
literature and information reports. They learn to use compound
sentences, and may also learn to use complex sentences. Students
learn to combine short, related sentences with appositives,
participial phrases, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional
phrases. When introducing a new type of sentence structure, the
teacher should provide adequate practice in writing sentences
before requiring students to use the new sentence type in
writing passages. Those assignments should be structured to
prompt usage of the new sentence type. In addition, the teacher
should provide adequate cumulative review to facilitate
understanding and retention as well as exercises requiring the
students to revise existing passages by combining sentences and
thereby create a new type of sentence structure. Students should
be taught not only how to create new sentence types but when to
use them. For example, some students wi