Name of Game: "Discovering Sentences."
Target Students: Middle School and High School.
Duration: Optional.
Number of Students: Pairs.
Skills: Creative imagination, ingenious thinking and experiment, composition, syntax (word order), grammar, spelling and punctuation.
Objective: Correct sentence construction utilizing an established word list.
Simple Instructions: 1. I give each student a photocopy mixed word list (150-300).
2. The list is derived from Collins COBUILD Learner's Dictionary appended "Frequency list of words in the Dictionary" having the scale marker of 5 (most frequently occurring). Or, I derive a list from world-english's "The 500 Most Commonly Used Words in the English Language" and "The 100 Most Commonly Used Verbs in the English Language." There are, of course, other sources.
3. I permit superlatives and past tenses and plurals and other suffixes, etc., that can be devised from the basic words on the list, e.g., says, saying, and said for say OR bad, badder, baddest, badly, badness, for bad.
4. Dictionaries and textbooks, etc, are allowed.
Variations: Contest 1 (a fast game): Who can make a single shortest sentence?
Contest 2 (a bit longer game): Who can make a single longest sentence?
Contest 3 (a very long game): Who can make the most sentences, short or long?
Notes/Comments: This is a great time to teach sentence types and give examples, i.e., imperative (Do it!), interrogative (Do what?), declarative (Do this.), and exclamatory (Help me!). It is also a good time to emphasize capitalization and punctuation. My students had great fun doing this competition. I was surprised by their inventiveness and originality in forming the sentences.
