Some Sentence Making Worksheets and Activities

The kids start studying present progressive tense in New Horizons 1, unit 9 but this should be a good review for second or third year. The worksheet is short so it shouldn't take to long. After the kids do it and check it it the answers can be used as model answers for a charades game or pictionary.

This one is a collection of what I hope are interesting pictures for the kids to make sentences out of. Third grade used it to review Units 1 and 2 at my school. We made it a competition like this:

• the teachers pass out the worksheet one to each kid.
• review the vocabulary. "baseball", "cat", "angry cat"
• the teachers give some examples of possible sentences that the kids can make--ranging from super simple, "This is a baseball." to more complex, "Hot dogs are eaten by many people."
• the kids are put into their lunch groups
• as a team they chose three things to make sentences about.
• the teachers tell them that simple sentences are okay but also encourage them to use their imagination to make at least three sentences about each thing they choose.
• after five minutes someone from each team ( the loser of a janken) has to read the sentences.
• the two teachers then consult over what score to award that team. Ten is the highest one is the lowest.

Each team chooses three items to write about,so if you do it the same way we did it at my school then you can have three rounds. The kids are competitive so on the second and third rounds they will probably be revising the simple sentences they wrote at the beginning of the exercise. This is a good thing. When you award the scores you can use any criteria you like; number of sentences, correctness, imagination, complexity of grammar. Of course don't give any group a very low score, and always look for something good to say about even the simplest attempts. Originally we had planned to do only one round, but it went so well we kept going. The kids came up with some interesting sentences: "I like hot dogs, but I don't like walking hot dogs."....When you see the worksheet you'll understand.

This activity is meant for the Grade 3 and utilizes the vocabulary in Units 1 and 2. Of course it can be done with vocabulary for any grade. It's just a matter of putting the pieces together. There are twelve sentences drawn from the review section, Unit 1 and Unit 2. The idea is to print them out bigger, cut them up into sections and paste them onto some stouter paper or laminate them--they are going to handled a lot.-- and use them as a kind of sentence puzzle.

Here's one way to do it:

• Put the sentence parts into envelopes, one for each lunch group.
• Each group gets an envelope, but they don't open them until you say,"Go!"
• Tell the kids that they have x amount of time to make sentences with the sentence parts.
• You might tell them that any grammatical sentence is worth one point but if they can reproduce the sentence from the textbook it's worth two points. If there is a mistake you deduct a point ( Or not. However you want to do it.)
• Say "Go."

Maybe you don't think it is so important that the kids remember the exact sentences that occurred in the textbook. If so, then you can give points for the number of words used in each sentence, or to the first team to create a grammatical sentence.

Similar exercises based on other grammar might be a useful and fun way to review.