Howling AAAWWUBBIS: Continuing the Experiment

I like counting the subordinating conjunctions on my fingers—helps me remember the 3 As and 2 Ws take all my left hand fingers!

A 5th grader greeted me wide-eyed with wonder as I entered the classroom one day this week. "I Googled 'AAAWWUBBIS,' and it came up! It's a real thing!" I told him I was honored he thought I was creative enough to come up with it all on my own.

If you’ve never heard of AAAWWUBBIS, then you’ve also missed out on the energizing experience of howling “Aaah-WOOOO-bis!” with a roomful of 4th and 5th graders. (The 6th and 7th graders let me howl on my own. Not quite as energizing. Funny thing, maturity.)

What is AAAWWUBBIS? It’s a mnemonic for the 10 most common subordinating conjunctions (see photo above). As we’ve learned in grades 4-7, If you start a sentence with one of them, you’ll probably need a comma. 

I’m continuing with my experiment using Patterns of Power (or POP) this year. It’s a daily 5-10 minute sequence of language conventions practice at the intersection of reading and writing, moving students from noticing a pattern writers use and what effect it has, to using it themselves. (For the 5 blog posts I’ve written so far reflecting on my implementation, see this link). After studying sentences starting with if, when, and as, I finally let students in on the secret that there are actually a whole bunch more words that, when starting a sentence with them, you’ll probably need a comma. Enter AAAWWUBBIS. 

Two things I added this term were a notebook element and a “tiny quiz.” Both of these ideas I got from colleagues on the Facebook group for Patterns of Power, and I'm forever grateful for that online support community. Each pattern we study includes the following:

• Notice (Day 1): A mentor sentence from a middle grades text that models the pattern. 
• Compare (Day 2): Adding a similar sentence to see how it is like and unlike the mentor sentence.
• Apply (Days 3-5): Using the model pattern, create a sentence together. Create a sentence on your own. Hunt and gather a sentence from another source.
• Edit (Day 6): Given 3 variations on the original mentor sentence, how is each different and what is the effect of that difference?

Then on Day 7, the “tiny quiz” is a 2-point quiz with a new sentence using the pattern that has one error in it. There’s a multiple choice array of possible changes, and an opportunity to write the reason for choosing that change.  

Day 1 of the current cycle we started by studying this sentence:
"Before she lost her nerve, she stepped over the invisible line and onto the trail." --Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee, Maybe a Fox

Students noticed a lot of things. It’s about a girl (she/her). It’s in the past—both verbs—because in English you need to be consistent with the tense. (It’s a difficulty for many of my students because Japanese doesn’t really worry about tense until the very end of the sentence.) We also discussed the meaning of “to lose your nerve.” And students noticed the introductory clause and the main clause, separated by a comma.

When we got to Day 3, I wrote, “Before I lost my nerve, I…” and asked students to create a sentence that was true for them. My example: “Before I lost my nerve, I picked up the phone and answered in Japanese.” (I find speaking a foreign language in person much less intimidating because I have all the body language cues for back up.) One student called out, “I never lose my nerve!” I filed that insight away and replied, “Then write fiction.”

Yesterday was Day 5. I told the students to get out their POP notes AND the novel we’re reading, Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr. “Oh!” a girl lit up. “This is the day to hunt!” Yes! They’re getting the pattern. This is the day they hunt for the pattern “in the wild”—their own independent reading book, another textbook, our writing mentor texts, or now, the novel we’re all reading together. Here’s the one I found: “When I’d finished, he laughed loudly” (Adventures with Waffles, p. 104). Every student had their novel open, searching, calling me over excitedly when they found one. 

Not all of the finds were clear cut. One student had a sentence that had a “but” before the “when.” A few had prepositional phrases. One had a simile the author had made a sentence on its own. All things I filed away to address next term, after Christmas. But I praised them for finding sentences that started with an AAAWWUBBIS word and told them to write what they found in their notebook. 

I told them we are becoming better writers and readers on step at a time: right foot—notice what good writers do—left foot—try it out in your own writing.

I’m such a big fan of consistency over time. I’m loving seeing students becoming more and more cued into the patterns—the patterns of what we are doing in class, and the patterns of what good writers do. 

I’m okay howling AAAWWUBBIS all by myself in 6th and 7th grade every so often. As long as it helps them notice how writers start sentences with subordinate clauses, and start doing it themselves. After all, the 4th and 5th graders will howl with me.

After the 5th grader clued me in to Googling AAAWWUBBIS, I found a chant. Maybe it will work better with some students than the 10 fingers above. I’ll have to try it  with the kids on Monday!

What experiments have you tried to see what actually helps students understand and purposefully use the grammar patterns of powerful writers?