Transitions

What they are:

Transitions or "signal words" indicate relationships between ideas. In general, you want students to know that transitions appear at the beginning of a sentence and are followed by a comma.

Activities:

"Hanging" transitions

How it works: Teachers provide students with a complete sentence followed by sentence starting with a transitional phrase and then students have to finish the sentence. For example:

The cell cycle contains many phases. Initially, ________________________________________________________.

Julia constantly has conflict in her relationship with Amá. For example, ________________________________________________________________.

Selecting from a menu

How it works: Like the "hanging" transitions activity, teachers will provide a complete sentence. Then, the second sentence will be missing the transitional phrase. For example:

The cell cycle contains many phases. _________, the cell grows during the G1 phase.

Julia constantly has conflict in her relationship with Amá. _______, Amá regularly insinuates that it was Julia's fault that her sister died.

Students will then be given a menu of transitions from which to chose and use those transitions to fill in the missing phrase. This can be done as multiple choice for individual sentences, open response with students using the reference charts above, or matching transitions to multiple sentences (see below)

Matching transitions to the content

How it works: The teacher will provide. the student with multiple sentence pairs that are missing a transitional phrase and the same number of transitional phrases and ask students to match the phrases to the sentence pairs in which they work best. For example:

Directions: Match each transition below to the sentence pair in which it makes the most sense.

As a result Specifically However For example

1. The New Deal was incredible popular among Americans who were suffering economically during the Great Depression. _________, President Roosevelt easily won Re-Election in 1936.

2. Many of the New Deal programs sought to address the high unemployment numbers in the early 1930s. ________, Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired unemployed workers and funded local public works projects.

3. A large number of New Deal programs focused on improving the lives of people living in rural America. ________, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) worked to bring electricity to Americans living in isolated, remote areas.

4. The New Deal improved the quality of life for many Americans. _________, African Americans and other people of color were excluded from a number  of the opportunities created by New Deal programs

"Slash" sentences

How it works: In this activity, the teacher provides students with a transition and 1-2 content vocabulary terms separated by slashes and asks them to construct 1-2 sentences using the words. Here are a few examples with  possible student responses

for example / Black Panthers --> Many of the Black Pathers' activities focused on addressing issues caused by urban poverty. For example, the Panthers started the Free Breakfast for School Children Program.

as soon as / Romeo / Rosalind --> As soon as Romeo meets Juliet, he is no longer "in love" with Rosalind.

Why to use it:  This activity introduces students to a number of more "academic" terms to use when linking ideas in sentences and gives them practice using those words. Also, this strategy allows multiple student responses while assessing student knowledge of content vocabulary.

*Pro tip: This is a great strategy for creating vocabulary-based test questions. If you make two different versions of a test, you can keep the content vocabulary the same and change the conjunctions.