Extending a Sentence

An important part of any class is of course to get students to take a basic idea and expand upon it. Or conversely, it's often valuable to have students distill something down to its most basic parts. English classes naturally come to mind when you mention extending and reducing sentences, and they're clearly what you think of when you visit this site: http://www.telescopictext.com/. After all, it's getting students to take a basic block (two or three words in this case), and build upon it. Here, the sentence "I made tea" becomes a full descriptive and narrative paragraph.

But when you take Nik Peachey's suggestions for other basic sentences that are meant to spark more detail ("I went to the beach." "I saw a film." "I went to school."), you can think about applying this to other subjects. "Photosynthesis is a process." "We went to a play yesterday." "I have a dream."

Another way of using this idea would be to let students visit this site and extend the sentence that's there and then take another, already develeoped idea, in the opposite direction. Perhaps you could call it "Collapsing a Paragraph." This could be very useful in getting students to cull something down to its essence and thereby understand each of its parts more deeply.