How to Actually Fix Fragments and Run-Ons in Upper Elementary

Why Teaching Sentence Structure Feels Impossible (And Why Worksheets Fail)

You aren’t alone in your frustration, and you aren’t imagining things.

Truth be told, teaching run-ons feels like an impossible task.

Here’s why: For years, we’ve told our students to “Add more details!” to their writing. And so they did. Now we’re stuck trying to unravel full pages of unpunctuated details.

The kids did exactly what we asked. But that’s not what we meant.

In turn, the “add more details” dictate has caused a secondary issue. Many students no longer recognize a short simple sentence as being complete, especially in upper elementary and middle school. In their minds, a short sentence lacks all the good juicy details, therefore it isn’t complete, it must be a fragment.

When we say “complete sentence”, our students hear “complete narrative”. Thus confusion ensues.

Take for example the simple sentence: Dogs bark.

We know both the WHO and the DID WHAT, which makes it a complete sentence. But not in our students’ minds. Our students want to know . . .

• What was the dog’s name?
• Why was the dog barking?
• Where was the dog?
• When was the dog barking?

They want the whole story wrapped up in a single sentence.

Because of this misunderstanding, students think they are giving us exactly what we’ve asked for when they write something like this:

My dog Winston was barking last night because he saw a cat. Walking along the fence in the backyard and then my dad got mad and told Winston to stop barking but he didn’t stop barking because the cat was still there.

It reads more like a stream of consciousness. As they think of something new, they add it, even if it doesn’t make sense organizationally or timeline-wise. This is how we end up with an ill-punctuated story or essay.

Side note: When it comes to teaching students about avoiding fragments, please understand that writers, especially fiction writers, use fragments ALL. THE. TIME. We use them for effect. When you declare an edict like “Never use a fragment!” the kids eventually tune out because they see them every single time they read a narrative story. You’ve now lost all credibility.

There’s one more reason why I think kids struggle to understand, identify, and correct fragments and run-ons, and it might be something you’ve never considered before.

Have you ever listened to your students read aloud?

I’m sure you have, but have you ever noticed that when students read – yours and mine – they don’t read the punctuation? Instead, they speed right through and completely ignore those punctuation marks, as if they don’t exist. As a result, their ears can’t discern when a sentence sounds weird or incomplete.

So how do we correct or overcome these issues and misconceptions in a way that helps students master writing in complete sentences while avoiding unintended fragments and run-ons?

Great question!

Deconstructing Fragments and Run-Ons: The Prerequisite Skills Students Need First

A few years ago, I fell down a deep rabbit hole learning everything I could about teaching grammar. The more I learned and analyzed individual grammar skills, the more I realized that each grammar skill is comprised of multiple smaller skills; skills that often are overlooked or assumed to be learned.

Take fragments, for instance. Before my students can fully and truly understand, recognize, fix, and avoid writing a fragment, they first must understand the following concepts:

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Subjects (Who or What?)
• Predicates (Did what?)
• Prepositional Phrase (which is missing both the subject and predicate)
• Dependent Phrase (AKA fragment)
• Independent Phrase (AKA complete sentence)

Now fragments are a fairly easy skill to teach and fix in isolation, but what about run-ons? Before students fully grasp the concept of a run-on, they must understand:

• Sentence Fragments
• Subject-Predicate Pairs
• Dependent Phrases
• Independent Clauses
• Complete Sentences
• Compound Sentences
• FANBOYS coordinating conjunctions
• Complex Sentences
• Subordinating conjunctions
• Comma splice (more of a middle or high school concept)
• Fused run-on

Not so easy, huh?

Suddenly it makes sense why kids aren’t getting grammar. That’s a lot of different skills that need to be taught and mastered in order for your students to truly conquer run-ons.

Which is not to say that run-ons are impossible to teach – they’re not – but it explains why this skill is so dang hard to teach. Especially if you’re trying to teach it at the beginning of the school year. (Yeah, don’t do that)

Before teaching any grammar skill (any skill, really), decompose the skill down into its basic building block skills. What prerequisite skills do you need to teach or review?

Now that you understand what skills your kids will need to know, it’s time to start planning out your grammar lessons according to the learning progression.

A Step-by-Step Learning Progression for Teaching Fragments and Run-Ons

Your students won’t master grammar overnight, much to our chagrin. Instead, it’s our job to plan learning activities that move them through a learning progression. By teaching this way, at every stage, students deepen their knowledge and proficiency with grammar. This gives them the time they need to internalize the skills as well as the repeated exposure and practice they need to reach proficiency.

Basically, I get to guide the students through a lesson on their computer. The kids get a kick out of watching me “take over their computer” as I model a sentence, and I get a ton of formative assessment data from watching students attempt to use the skill independently the first time. Plus there’s a script I can read (if I want to).

Identify Skills in Isolation

The next learning stage is the Identification stage. Before a student can fix a fragment or run-on, they have to be able to recognize one when they see it. Since we’re still early in our learning progression, this stage is typically identifying skills in isolation.

An easy identification activity is to set up a digital wheel you can spin and fill it with fragments and complete sentences. When you spin, the class reads the random sentence that pops up and declares it as either a fragment or sentence.

To extend this activity, have students tell you what the subject or predicate is for each sentence or identify what information is missing from the fragments. Here’s the link to my Fragments Digital Wheel. I use the Wheel of Names website, plus it’s free.

One of my favorite activities for this stage are Grammar Scoots. Most of my grammar scoots typically include 20 different task cards that I stash around the classroom. Some cards are visible and easy to find, while other cards are a bit more hidden. Under desks, on the back of chairs and sometimes even on the back of a student. I don’t know who’s more entertained . . . me or the kids.

When I teach fragments, students work in pairs to identify each card as either a fragment or sentence. Don’t want your students up and moving? Try having them sit in a circle and they pass the cards instead. Same concept, but less potential for misbehavior.

Then we go over the answers together. It’s a pretty good temperature check that lets me clarify any misconceptions right away. When we get to the next learning stage, we’ll revisit these task cards.

Fix Sentences in Isolation

By now, your students should understand the concept, be fairly fluent in the vocabulary terms, and can identify and match sentence parts. Now it’s time to fix sentences in isolation.

It’s time to revisit those scoots we did earlier. Only this time, instead of just identifying a card as a fragment, run-on, or sentence, now we are fixing the fragments or run-ons. Now the kids get to use their own creativity to finish the thought or determine how to separate the run-on. Once again, we’re doing this with a partner for added support and we’ll go over our answers as soon as we’re done, so we can correct mistakes.

So far, all of our grammar work has been done in isolation. As teachers, we’re controlling everything. Which might lull us into a false sense of success. Yes, the kids can fix these sentence errors when we’ve cherry-picked them and served them up. But can they pick the fragment out of a lineup? In other words, if we bury them in a full paragraph, will your students still be able to identify the fragment or run-on and fix it?

This is where typical grammar lessons and activities stop. We’ve taught the skill and practiced it. We’re done, right? The kids have learned what they needed to learn, right?

Identify & Fix Fragments and Run-Ons in Context

Not likely. Now is when we need to shift our attention from isolated sentence fragments and runs-on to fragments and run-ons in context. This is the crucial step most teachers skip.

In this stage, we present students with a text, approximately a paragraph or more. This is a great time to differentiate the texts and tasks for your students. Easy, shorter texts (around 75 words long) may only contain one fragment or run-on to find. Longer texts can contain more than one fragment or run-on.

When I first tried this out with my students, I was SURE they would easily pick out the fragment from the passage. The fragment seemed so obvious to me. Surely it would be to my class, too. But let me tell you teacher-friends, I was shocked at how hard this was for them!

I’m convinced that part of the trouble stemmed from the way my students were reading the passage. They were speeding through, blatantly blowing right past those commas and periods. Which meant they couldn’t hear the mistake.

A good part of what I do as a writer is read back my own writing so I can listen for sentences that just don’t sound right. It’s a skill I’ve honed over many, many years, but it wasn’t a skill my students had learned yet.

Here’s how I addressed that issue.

1. Make the punctuation more visible. Highlight every single comma and period, question mark, or exclamation mark.
2. Then read the passage again and state the punctuation mark when you come to it.
3. Now reread dramatically, like you’re an actor.

Suddenly, finding that fragment or run-on became much easier. Not only that, but their reading comprehension shot up. Instead of just decoding or trying to reach their one-minute word count goal, they were reading for meaning.

Want an even more fun way to make punctuation visible? Create large texts on chart paper and have students use dry pasta to represent the punctuation marks. It can be a bit messy but a lot of fun, especially if you transform your classroom into an Italian eatery, complete with checkered tablecloths, cutlery, and flickering fake tea lights.

Or have your students read a passage from the bottom up. Read the last sentence. Then read the second to last sentence, and so on. Now you’re not focused on the story of the text but are hyper focused on just the content of each individual sentence.

It’s pretty easy to use AI to create these passages yourself, but if you want to save time, I’ve created reading passage task cards for you. These are great if you want to do a small room transformation while teaching grammar.

Generate & Revise Own Text

By now, if you’ve worked your way through each stage of the learning progression, your students should have a solid grasp on how to fix and avoid fragments and run-ons.

At first, I might ask my students to write an isolated complete sentence. It’s a good quick formative assessment that lets me know which students need to revisit learning activities and which students are ready to fly on their own.

The time has finally come to release the students to generate and revise their own longer writing pieces. Are they writing in complete sentences? If they do write a fragment or run-on, can they find it on their own? Can they fix their mistakes?

Assessment

If you want a really good grammar assessment, create a quiz that includes questions from each of the learning phases. Start with a simple identification question, then move on to matching sentence parts, fixing the fragment or run-on. Then give students a short paragraph and ask them to find and fix the fragment or run-on. End with students writing a complete sentence of their own.

While the assessment is typically around a page long, it will quickly identify exactly where the hang-up is.

If your students are ready for the next step, try teaching sentence combining and sentence expansion. Both skills are vital writing skills but now that your students understand fragments and run-ons, the challenge is to expand sentences WITHOUT becoming a run-on or fragments.

Writing is all about thinking creatively, critically, and flexibly in order to communicate our viewpoint, knowledge, or ideas to a reader. If people can’t decipher the writing – due to fragments, messy run-ons, or lack of punctuation – they won’t be able to understand the point you’re trying to make.

Next Steps to Extend the Learning

By this point in the learning progression, you’ll likely have some students who have mastered the skill and are ready to move on, while others . . . well, not so much.

In order to ensure all students have the time they need to learn, you’ll need to build in some long-term practice opportunities.

For example, to practice identifying and fixing fragments, students can search for fragments in the novels or short stories they read. It’s an easy, no-tech way of utilizing what you’re already doing by adding on another layer to it.

Or teach your students how to combine sentences . . . WITHOUT turning it into a run-on.

After the kids have written something, let them use the speech-to-text feature on their computer. As they read their writing aloud, they have to state the punctuation marks aloud. The more we can call attention to punctuation marks, the better.

If your students are ready for more of a challenge, try presenting your class with unpunctuated passages to see if they can correctly punctuate it. These are really easy to create with AI, but if you’re looking for a resource to buy, check out these Unpunctuated Passages.

Wrap Up

Remember, grammar is a long game. Most skills take repeated practice opportunities over a long period of time before they ever find their way into independent student writing.

By taking a complex grammar skill, decomposing it into its building block skills, and guiding students through a structured learning progression – from direct instruction to context-based revision – you’ll see real, lasting success. Not only will your students’ writing clarity and grammar skyrocket, but their reading comprehension. will improve right along with it!

Want to learn more about how to get your students excited about learning grammar? Check out this FREE email training I put together for teachers like you. When you sign up, you’ll be added to my mailing list so you never miss a resource or training again!