Things to do with sentence builders in the primary languages classroom

 

Writing frames, sentence builders, whatever you call them, are enjoying considerable popularity in the languages community at the moment, due mainly to the work of Gianfranco Conti.  If you are a tweeter or if you are in one of the languages Facebook group, you'll have seen lots of posts about them and ideas for using them.

You can see at the top of this post one of the sentence builders that I have been using most recently.  I nearly always use the flowchart format (thanks Joe!) in primary, as I find with the tabular format it's too easy for them to miss columns out.  I also make them in black and white, as colour photocopying is only for special occasions at my schools!  If it's not clear enough without colour, it's not clear enough, I think.

I've been experimenting with using them and knowledge organisers this academic year to facilitate our work in class at a time when I have to stay at the front and not go to help individual children.

We have been trying out different activities with them, for example (in no particular order):

• I say the Spanish sentence, children tell me the English
• I say an English sentence, children tell me what it would be in Spanish
• Children test each other in one of the above two ways 
• I say a Spanish sentence, but leave it incomplete, either just saying the first sound of the last word or stopping at a suitable place, and children need to complete the sentence with the correct word or with suitable words.
• After a little practice, I show a sentence from the sentence builder with a random extra word in it.  The children have to tell me which word is unnecessary.
• I say a sentence in English and the children write it in Spanish on their mini whiteboards and hold it up for me to see.
• I write a sentence from the sentence builder on my mini whiteboard, and the class between them have 10 attempts to guess the sentence, which I then reveal after the 10 attempts or when it is guessed correctly.
• I prepare a sentence from the sentence builder and conceal it.  The children all prepare a sentence and write it on their mini whiteboards.  The children stand up.  I reveal my sentence word by word.  As soon as the children have a word in their sentence that is different to mine, they have to sit down, until we reach the end of the sentence and hopefully there is someone left who has the same sentence as me.  Thanks to Sue Cave for this idea - Year 3 loved it this morning, although one of the boys saw through my strategy of not wanting to repeat words!

Do you have any favourite activities when using sentence builders?  There are some that I have seen that are a bit reading-heavy for primary children; I'd love to increase my repertoire!  Please leave any ideas in the comments.