Verbally practicing composition skills is one of the easiest, most entertaining ways to improve students’ writing. For example, you begin a lesson on prime numbers and want your class to rehearse the definition, “A prime number can only be divided by one and itself.” As students repeat this definition to each other, they make the capital letter gesture (see images of the gestures above) at the start the sentence and the period gesture at the finish.

Or, you want students to develop their skill with adjectives. On the board is the sentence frame:

The (adjective) girl ran home.

As your class completes the sentence as many times as possible, they use the gestures for capital letter, period and adjective.

A topic sentence frame like the following employs five brainies:  capital letter, because, and, comma and period.

Whole Brain Teaching is a great instructional method because _________, __________, and ___________.

Our Brainy Game contains over 35 gestures including:  capital letter, period, exclamation mark, question mark, quotation marks, comma, adjective, preposition, simile/metaphor, compare, contrast, because, and, for example, but, if/then, In conclusion.

Truth be told, we were inspired by the phonetic composition skills of the great comedian Victor Borge.

Here is the entire Brainy collection.