My favorite thing to work on with students is grammar, so when I got the chance to review The Speech Bubble’s “Cooking Up Simple Sentences“, I jumped on it!
This product targets sentence structure in two ways: indentifying complete sentences vs. incomplete sentences and creating simple sentences and expanding them appropriately. ***I think my favorite part is the words going into the mixer on the cover. SO CUTE!
First, there is a visual poster included that describes what is needed to make a sentence.
Next is the first set of cards. They have sentences (some complete and some incomplete) at the top. Students must read the card and decide whether it is complete or incomplete. If the sentence is incomplete, there is a worksheet included so that students can finish it.
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| some complete vs. incomplete sentences |
Next comes the formulating sentences task. This is a multi-sensory approach to sentence structure. There are 3, 4, and 5 part sentences included.
When I used this with students, I actually made 2 copies of each of these pages. That way, students could make extremely unique sentences, just by scrambling and rescrambling the individual cards on the “mats” I made.
I also added another bit of complexity: once students had made a correct sentence, I asked how they could rearrange the existing words to make a sentence that meant the same thing. For example, “She is playing at home today because she was happy.” Moving the “when” word around changes the way the sentence sounds, but it means the same thing! This is sometimes a revloutionary concept for students. Another fun way to promote this idea would be to have each student in the group draw a picture of what the sentence(s) is/are saying. Talk about what is similar, what is different, and why the sentence can have the same meaning when said a couple different ways.
One of the wonderful aspects of this product is its versatility! Not only is it great for sentence structure, but it would also work for Wh- questions! The question words are right there on the cards! This would work great with groups of students with varying goals (aka every group I have this year!)
There are also “special” cards included to make any of these tasks into a game!
Add this 29 page download to your materials library by downloading here!
My thoughts are with all of those affected by today’s tragedy in Boston. <3
