Travis: Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Welcome back to PoPCast. This is Travis and Whitney. Yeah, we're here hanging out again to talk about revision. So we're in the midst of sharing a series of revision strategies with you.
Today we really want to focus on verbs as we revise our writing. I'm going to start by elevating a little bit of content around forming new verbs from our Patterns resource. Read just a little quotable to you: "Without verbs, nothing happens. Sentences don't live without verbs. We need verbs to activate our writing. So when revising, don't forget the ever powerful verb as a place to look for possible enhancements.”
Whitney: Yes.
Travis: We're going to focus specifically or with specificity on three entry points into revision, thinking about verbs and how we might enhance or change them or remix them in the writing that we do as we are enhancing our writing. So we
Whitney: Think about our draft acronym: Delete, Rearrange, Add, this is the F Form new verbs, and then of course T is Talking out. So we're going to focus on that F: Forming new verbs.
Travis: We're going to elevate the three focal points or the lenses that we went through when we are forming new verbs specifically for the revision strategies that we are promoting and sharing with you. So, Whitney, why don't you lead us off and talk to us about one of those entry points into forming new verbs.
Whitney: [00:02:00] Sure. First of all, this does look a little different in the elementary books as opposed to the junior, the middle school books. In grades three through five, the forming new verbs is really just embedded into our combining chapter.
In third grade, the only strategy that we look at for forming new verbs is forming verbs in infinitive form, meaning putting that to before the verb. So I thought that we would start there. So from third grade, I wanted to pull a sentence from What's Inside a Flower and Other Questions About Science and Nature by Rachel Ignotofsky. It's a tough one to say. I don't completely know if I said that right. Sorry, Rachel.
Travis: We love your work.
Whitney: We do and the book is beautiful. It's great nonfiction about flowers and science and nature, and the sentence that we're looking at or that we turn into that we combine into becomes this: Some flowers have strong smells to attract pollinators.
So there's a reason for using an infinitive, it's showing what verbs, the reason why we would need this verb, or we would need this action. The sentences that we turned around and broke this down into we have to deconstruct this sentence in order to provide ideas for the students to combine. So we have,
Some flowers have strong smells.
Strong smells attract pollinators.
Some flowers use the strong smells.
So the students have to really think about the verbs being used and what these strong smells and the flowers, that relationship between, and really look at what they do in order to think about how those verbs would go together.
And at that point, we would introduce our students [00:04:00] to adding this word "to" in front of one of the verbs to help them combine these three sentences. So that's just an example. This episode, by the way, is going to be short and sweet. We're just giving examples. Instead of taking you through an entire lesson, we just wanted to give you examples of each of these ways to form, did you hear that infinitive, each of these ways to form new verbs. So that is an example of an infinitive, putting that to before the verb.
Participles are another entry point that we highlight and elevate. In the middle school resource, there's a standalone chapter for forming new verbs. If you want some more clarity around infinitives or participles, or as we'll talk about next, shifting between passive and active voice, the front introductory matter before we get into the lessons is a great touch point for you to reference. So you can get a better understanding of maybe that definition of it, what it looks like and how we might talk through it.
Travis: We also do some great work here, both in the middle school resource on the stand-alone forming new verbs chapter and in the elementary resource in the combining chapter where Whitney and Jeff have elevated the options of forming new verbs, the potential for that. We help talk you through that.
So if this is a part that for you maybe feel a little bit unfamiliar or uncomfortable in territory, I know as a revisor this is something new to me as I was getting into this work in the classroom and then shifting that over into my work as a writer. This was a new lens for me to think and work through.
Whitney: So if you're in that space, just know that we've got you. We've got a lot of support in that teacher to teacher conversation that's happening in the text. Also, along with that, we do have the Form New Verbs chart. [00:06:00] So the Form New Verbs chart is available online, it's in the book in fourth and fifth grade, but third grade you can access it online by going to fourth or fifth grade. And this Form New Verbs chart is there to help you as well as help your students. We do provide materials to help everyone understand this idea of what it means to form a new verb.
So just be aware of that too. That we do have supports there. I will say Travis for me, this has been a new lens as a writer of really thinking more about this. And when I'm writing on my own, when I'm, I'm now thinking a little bit more about, Ooh, when I combine, how might I form a new verb or how might I use this verb in a different way? It's even elevated my own writing as well.
Travis: No, I love that. The crossover to our work is amazing.
Whitney: Yes, for sure. All right, let's talk participles.
Travis: As we're talking about participles, I just want to give a nod to something that Jeff highlighted for me, the work of Francis Christensen in her book Notes Toward a New Rhetoric. She talks about participles and she says that "sentences with participle phrases tumbling off the end are the most used patterns in modern writing and one of the easiest for novice writers to navigate."
Whitney: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true.
Travis: Sit with that one for a second. So when you are even just as a reader or as a teacher thinking through all of your planning lenses when you're interacting with the text, when you're trying to look for participles, you're going to notice them oftentimes as a closer, as that kind of ending the sentence. Here's a chunk of the sentence, the comma, the participle, the -ing verb, if you will, and then that phrase, giving us [00:08:00] ongoing action and what we did to really support that is the example that we used.
I'm going to just give a shout out to the eighth grade book. We pulled some text from the Book Flip the Script by Lila Lee and this sentence: "Too nervous to stand still, I bounce my leg up and down as I snack on my Flamin' Hot Cheetos, plucking each one out of the bag with my chopsticks and popping it in my mouth."
So what that does gives us that ongoing action that's happening within that sentence. Within the lesson, we've just pulled those ideas apart and really highlighted each of those verbs separately for students to be able to interact with for us to talk them through. Okay, we have multiple verbs here. If we want to compress ideas and start to combine those ideas together, this is one way that we can do it. We can take this content here and attach this verb at the end of that sentence by using a comma and then forming a new form of that verb. So going from pluck to plucking, going from pop to popping, and then talking about how we can combine those.
Whitney: My favorite sentence from fifth grade comes from A Seed in the Sun by Ida Salazar and Travis, I know you know this one because we've used it in a presentation together before, but it's just such a beautifully written sentence and it says, "Still we approach cautiously, hiding behind a line of cars parked along the road."
And so when we break that apart we're really illustrating the two separate actions there. We're approaching something cautiously.
“We approach cautiously.” and “We hide behind a line of cars.”
Well, we could turn that into a compound sentence, right? But to make that even to make it more sophisticated, to make it more concise, we could take hide and turn that to hiding and form that new verb, which becomes a participle. And adding that comma, hiding behind a line of cars parked along the road.
Travis: And while we do want to give a shout out to participles, they don't just exist in this present tense, -ing ending format, we have felt that that's the really effective entry point for students to interact in that way. There are other endings that of course can be discussed that you can use as you gain mastery of this process and you want to build and facilitate learning with your students based on text that you are pulling and using. But just so that you know that -ing format is the one that we find is a great entry point for forming new verbs for students.
Whitney: Yeah, students can feel really successful in doing that, and it allows them to really focus on the verbs even more. That's one thing I really like about our Forming New Verbs lessons, the ones that focus on that. It allows our students to dive a little bit deeper into that verb and what it can do in a sentence.
Travis: The third lens that we're gonna look through when we are forming new verbs is Looking at the structure of a sentence. If it's structured in passive voice, we're gonna work with students in discussing how we might reformat that sentence to turn it into active voice. And we by no means are promoting active voice is the only way to construct a sentence because there are various formats and various purposes for writing, where passive voice is important and can be effective.
I'm thinking of scientific writing where the scientist or the actor isn't the most important part of the sentence, but what is [00:12:00] happening, that scientific process, is what we want to elevate. In the news, if we don't know who the perpetrator is, we can say some what was being perpetrated, without knowing who the subject is, but ultimately, students for the most part, active voice is going to be something that's going to be highly effective for students in most of the modes of writing that we are interacting with in our elementary or middle school language arts classes. Most of the time it's going to make sense.
So with that in mind, we have also given some examples in the middle school resource forming new verbs chapter including a specific stand-alone lesson where we have part of this, the sentence that we've broken apart deconstructed where some of that is in passive voice. We help talk students through and understand what is making this sentence constructed in passive voice and how might we rearrange, reorganize it, and format, reformat that verb specifically or those verbs in the sentence to turn that into active voice.
Whitney: Yeah, and in fourth and fifth grade within our combining lessons, we do have one in each grade level that has a focus on active voice. I think at the elementary level, the biggest thing that I focus on is just how we can make the sentence more active.
A lot of times our students, they're not necessarily writing in passive voice, but the verbs they're using are the ing verbs. So they're saying I was going or I was moving or she was swinging on the playground or she is swinging on the playground where we can just say she swings. Right?
That's good. That's going to be more concise. And so I, I usually will do that when I see that in their writing is think, okay how can we make this more active in that way? So in the lessons, we [00:14:00] do turn the sentence into one that is passive by putting “by” in front of it. So like the example in this fourth grade lesson that I'm looking at, the sentence comes from Rebecca Bell Carswell's Shine On, Luz Véliz!
The sentence is, "Hope fills up the crowded garage." Okay, that's telling what hope does. But then hope is this idea. It's not, it's not a person's name. It's an idea. And so to break that apart:
The garage is crowded.
The garage is filled up by hope.
We want to put that emphasis on hope on this idea of hope and so we can talk to students about emphasis and when would we want the subject to be emphasized, and that's going to help turn our verb into more active.
Travis: Yeah. What's great, kind of secondarily in the conversation that you're going to be having with students within these lessons, by the way, we also talk to you through our teacher talk, how we do this in the classroom is you get to have some deeper conversations about the structure of a sentence.
Some of that sentence structure conversation, you get to elevate who do we want this the focus of the sentence, the subject, what's happening to that subject? You get to have some rich conversations around sentence structure and within that also help students to understand the difference between passive and active voice so that they have some clarity and then can practice that work as they go into their own writing, or they're going to have some opportunities to play with this and remix this, revise as they go through the lesson.
So, forming new verbs. To recap, just know that you have access to through Rutledge's website to resources, not only that broader D-R-A-F-T, [00:16:00] all of the options that could be available to you as you revise, the DRAFTboard, but also we have that forming new verbs chart wherein we elevate for you and highlight for you and your students how we might form new verbs.
We look at infinitives, We look at participles. We look at active voice.
Whitney: Yeah, absolutely. There we go. There's our verbs. And I always just say, too, when you're combining, no matter what, you're going to invite your students to consider the verbs. A lot of times they're not going to form new verbs, but there is always that option. And like I said in the previous episode, they may decide to change a verb.
Instead of forming a new verb, they may change it to a different verb, right? Or a more vivid verb, one that makes it more active. There's always that option, too. The exercises that we take them through, which is a focus on forming new verbs, are these three. But, when we're exploring this idea of verbs, we do want our students, whenever they're combining, to look at the verbs and think about their possibilities.
Travis: There we go. All right. Take care, y'all.
Whitney: Bye!
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