Expanding Sentences . . . Hands-on Style!

For visual or hands-on learners, learning how to expand sentences can be difficult. They have to dig through the recesses of their minds for words that might not come as quickly as they’d like. They know they need to add more words to their small sentence, but they’re not sure how. In order to help my boys learn how to expand a sentence, I decided to use index cards. Reading words off index cards always worked well for them in the past. Why not try it here?

After writing out a variety of words and sorting through my stockpile of Word Wall cards, I divided 

them into various categories including: Pronouns, Nouns (People), Verbs, Colors, Adjectives, Nouns (Places), Nouns (Vehicles), and miscellaneous words like a, the, in, etc. We’ve been going through a transportation-themed unit, so I decided we could make sentences based on transportation (hence the Vehicles category).

First, I showed them how to make a simple sentence. (She broke the car.) To expand the sentence, I used cards from some of the other groups. I replaced “She” with “Jill.” Then I added “little, orange” to make “Jill broke the little, orange car.” 

My eldest immediately took to this idea. He started grabbing cards to make a sentence. As he created one, he would stop and take another word to expand on his original idea. “Tom sped the car” became “Tom sped the brown car up the hill.” My youngest struggled a bit more with this, but that could have been do to his older brother grabbing all the “cool” word cards. Still, he came up with some good sentences, too. And it was a good opportunity for me to show him how to expand a sentence.

Afterwards, we completed some worksheets. They enjoyed the card idea so much that my eldest wanted to do it again tomorrow. 

I think we found a winner!