Teaching Sentence Structure

Karianne Wilkins — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:34:12 +0000

I was doing a bit of homeschooling with my oldest daughter a few days ago and she was reading through sight word and blend cards that came with a game we have. Having the words on the cards all mixed up reminded me of a particular test I have given as a speech pathologist to evaluate a child’s language skills. One section of the test evaluates the child’s understanding of sentence structure by having the words from a sentence mixed up. The task requires the child to use every word and rearrange the words in proper order to create a meaningful sentence. The test gets more difficult by requiring the creation of two meaningful sentences, or sometimes it can be a sentence and a question that are created from the given words. The complexity of sentence structure also increases as the test progresses. I decided to try this with my daughter using the cards we have, although it could be done with words written on index cards or a piece of paper.

The first picture is an example of two sentences I gave my daughter with the words mixed up. These can be rearranged to say “What is that?” and “I will tell you.” And the final two pictures are an example of how a question and a sentence can be created from the same set of words.

I had not thought about doing this before, but think I will continue to do this with my daughter periodically to gauge how much she understands the structure of English language. As she gets older, I can see this activity being a fun way to introduce or review grammar lessons. Do you have any fun ideas for teaching grammar or sentence structure to your child? I would love to know about it! Please share in the comment section below.

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Teaching Sentence Structure