Sentence building activity

Teaching notes
1. Get students into small groups or pairs and give them a simple sentence to work
with, manipulate and, hopefully, ‘improve’. This should be short and simple. E.g.:

The girl sat on the chair.

2. Now give each group a set of cut out cards, face down. (You may wish to
differentiate by adapting or altering the cards or giving different cards to different
groups, depending on ability or time available.)

3. Then ask students to pick up the cards one at a time and add to or change their
sentence as instructed.

4. At this point, students can experiment freely with the sentences, each writing or
amending the sentence and then discussing or critiquing their changes as a group.
Ask them to think about: which alterations are the most effective? In which context
or for what purpose would it be most useful to have, for example, a prepositional
phrase of time?

5. Students can then move around the room (still in their groups), looking at what
other students have done and using these observations to inform their own writing.
Once students have finished, ask them to read out some of their amended versions
and discuss how their alterations impacted on the writing.

Add a series of
Add a
adjectives before Add a
prepositional Add a
or after a noun prepositional
phrase of reason prepositional
(e.g. hungry, phrase of time
or cause (e.g. phrase of place
tired, exhausted (e.g. throughout
because of the (e.g. in front of…)
students the class … )
dwarves…)
arrived…)

Change the order

Replace a ‘dull’
of the sentence
verb with a more Add reported
(e.g. Why not
interesting verb speech (e.g. All Add direct speech
come with me?
(e.g. walk she could say ("Er, hello!")
becomes Come
becomes trip or was hello.)
with me, why
tip-toe)
don't you?)

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