Thinking Stems FREEBIE

Description

Language stems, thinking stems, sentence starters…there are a lot of different names for this incredible teaching strategy! When I am planning for the needs of my ESL students, I think of them as language stems. When I am planning how to make my students thinking go one step further, I call them thinking stems. To my students, I call them our “Super Sentence Starters”. When I created my fifth anchor chart of stems, I realized it was time to consolidate. So…I created a helpful little book with all of the starters we use in my classroom. We have starters for talking about math strategies, summarizing reading, predicting, inferring, comparing/contrasting, stating opinions, book talk, and evidence proof.

After laminating each page, I bound them into a little book. I often refer to these pages while teaching mini lessons. But sometimes I prop a sentence stem book on each table group when students are working with partners or groups.

You can see more ideas like this on my blog at
Teaching and Tapas

Thanks!
Alyssha Swanson
Teaching and Tapas