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
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!