In this writing lesson, Maria Bailey, a literacy support teacher at Riverside Elementary School in Toledo, Ohio, works with students on sentence expansion — adding details to make sentences more interesting and informative. Students answer the question “why?” with some help from the word “because” to elaborate on a simple idea. The lesson begins with the whole group, then students work in partners, and finally they write expanded sentences independently. In writing longer sentences, students build their understanding of sentence structure. (From Reading Universe )