Sentence Stems

Do you remember sentence stems in school? If not, let me take you back in time. A sentence stem is a framework for the student to express their knowledge or opinion in a specific way.

It’s usually a sentence starter, so it’s a partial sentence. The student fills in the rest of the sentence.

For example, to help students read critically and then talk about what they read, a sentence stem might be: This story reminds me of Or: The author is saying ___.

We can use sentence stems too to help solve our own pesky problems. It provides a framework to begin solving the problem.

We all know what open-ended questions are. Think of this as an open-ended statement. You get the ball rolling in the right direction with the front of the sentence and then brainstorm the back end.

Let’s say you’re having a hard time getting something started, like a big project. You’ve been procrastinating because you know it’s going to take a lot of time. Or maybe you’re a bit afraid of whether you can do it at all.

So, a sentence stem that might get you moving is, “It would be easy to get started on my project if ___.” Then you fill in the rest of the sentence.

It would be easy to get started on my project if I mind-mapped it first. It would be easy to get started on my project if I called a friend & talked about it. It would be easy to get started on my project if I simply started typing into my computer. It would be easy to get started on my project if I didn’t watch any TV until I worked on it for 30 minutes.

In these examples I picked a word that’s the opposite of what’s happening. If it’s hard to get started on a big project, try using the word easy in the sentence stem. Our brain, then, focuses on that word.

From there you can keep brainstorming more endings to your sentence stem in one sitting. Or, you could sleep on it and add more in the morning when you’re fresh and let your subconscious mind go to work for you.

Then, select the best ones and create your action plan.

Try this if you’ve got a stubborn sales or even personal problem you want to tackle and let me know how it worked.