One of 7th grade Language standards is learning the different sentence types: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.

We’ve been working on this a lot, but some students are still not seeing the pattern.  I created this flowchart for them, and it seems to be helping.

Sometimes students can figure this out by following formulas:

Ind. = Simple

Ind + Ind = Compound

Ind + Dep = Complex

Ind + Ind + Dep = Compound- Complex

This flowchart provides a visual and a series of choices and steps for students to follow.  We made a small copy for each student to paste in their journal. Now the trick is to get them to reference them!