Literacy Development – improving sentence construction.
To allow children to continue their creativity and individual use of language, try using
‘opposite sentences’. That is, give them a sentence and ask them to write a sentence with
the opposite meaning.
e.g. Yesterday, Mark went to watch a super, fantastic, terrific, performer called Gigantic
Gary.
Replacement sentence might be,
Tomorrow, Mark is going to listen to a boring, pathetic, poor performer called called
Tiny Tim.
This type of activity allows the child to keep ownership of the choices made and gives
them a challenge to see how much they can change. You can vary the amount of
punctuation and complexity of sentence to suit the child. The child sees this as creative
English rather than punctuation exercises but this is learnt as an aside.
You could make this into a group/class challenge where children make sentences for each
other. You could have a set of different rule cards from which you can choose for each
game, e.g. only one word to be changed, or your opposite sentence must begin with last
word of sample sentence, or your opposite sentence must contain at least one comma.