When I started therapy with this year’s group of kids, I discovered we had one thing we needed to work on first: Making a sentence. Not only for the language delayed kids, but also for my ESL and articulation delayed kiddos, making sentences was not an easy task. I tried modeling, written and visual prompts, more modeling with no good carryover. How hard IS IT to remember the word “THE” and the word “IS” and stick another word in there that is pictured?!? Evidently more so than I EVER thought possible.
I was frustrated, they were frustrated… and NO ONE felt successful.
So back to the drawing board I went. I wanted to make an activity that used descriptive language because with adjectives, most things can be interpreted. Those special little words make the statement, “I want that.” which means absolutely nothing to me, into a BETTER statement, “I want that big, round thing.” Right?
For whatever reason, (maybe because they are four and five), my students LOVE animals. They want to pretend to BE animals, make animal NOISES, play with animals and so on. So six animals were chosen and more than 30 words were written onto strips. We made silly sentences, “The dinosaur is ugly. The mouse is sneaky. The alligator is fat.” We matched antonyms, synonyms, and learned a few new vocabulary words. Some of my groups were even linking together TWO words in ONE sentence before their time was up: “The dinosaur is loud AND tall.” Ahh! Success!
My sentence strips were not working for what I had imagined so I just took the advice of a fellow Instagram SLP and wrote the sentence on the table!
More sentence construction activities that are now available: