SUBMITTED BY: Carlee Miller     EDITED BY: まだ

Make Your Own Sentence

GRAMMAR: Gerund     EXAMPLE: I stopped watching TV.     DATE ADDED: 12-04-09  

ÒÓ    èéê    15-30 min.   8 Votes: 3 Stars If you're going to give this activity a low-rating, please post a useful comment to help make it better. SearchJHSActivity

Materials Needed:

• MakeYourOwnSentence worksheet

Detailed Explanation:

1. Have students get into groups of 3-4 and hand out one worksheet to each group.  Give the students a time limit of 10-15 minutes to complete the worksheet.  Students create and write as many sentences as they can using the elements from each box.  They can continue onto the back of their worksheet and/or notebooks.
2. At the end of the time limit, each group reads their sentences and you record how many viable sentences they made.
3. The group with the most sentences wins.

Variations:

• Adding in the element that if they have the same sentence as another group, both groups lose one point. So only original sentences that no other groups form scores points.

Teaching Suggestions:

• I designed this activity specifically for the grammar point in New Horizon's grade 2 textbook (pg. 60), but it can be used for any gerund practice. 

Comments:

• (Dec 9, 2011) Anonymous said: make a sentence using that
• (Dec 7, 2010) Carlee Miller (OP) said: I've made a few changes to the worksheet and it has replaced the old version. A few ideas to make this worksheet work better:
  1) I've added an instruction next to each vocabulary box. They are as follows:
  Box 1: (past tense verb), students can use each verb as many times as they want, but they must not do it consecutively. (So they can rotate through the verbs. This makes them think harder about the sentences they make.)
  Box 2: (gerund verbs) they can use these freely with no restrictions
  Box 3: (direct objects or D.O. phrases) they can only use each word or phrase once.
  
  2) Putting a time limit of 5 minutes on the writing portion gives the students plenty of time to come up with sentences and also makes it faster when it comes to scoring.
  
  3) When scoring, it is easier to have one group start reading their sentences. After each sentence, ask if any other groups have that sentence. If they do, everyone (including the current group) have to cross it off their lists. Then, after all groups have read their sentences, they count up how many sentences remain. The group with the most sentences wins.
  
  More tips to make it more fun/difficult:
  1) If you think that there will be one person doing all the work in the group, you can have it so that the students have to write one sentence and pass it to the next person in the group. This way everyone has to create a sentence.
  
  2) You could create your own magic sentence (you can make it an oddball one like "I stopped eating in the kitchen." or something else kind of wacky) and the group(s) that write that sentence get a magical extra 5 points.
  
  3) You can also say that you will give 2 points to sentences that make sense but are really funny. Of course, you would have to have a class that doesn't have sore losers in it to pull that off.