Wild Rose Learning

Here’s the exercise I use to teach my students about sentences.

When I teach my students about sentence structure, I like to write down three different sentences to test their understanding.

I write one that’s complete, one that’s missing a subject and one that’s missing a predicate.

For example:

1. The dog ran around the park.
2. Jumped in the pool.
3. Billy and Sarah.

After I write these down on the whiteboard, I’ll ask my student if she sees anything wrong with the sentences. 

And if I did my job properly, she’ll point out that sentences 2 and 3 are incomplete.

Afterwards, I’ll tell her why.

I’ll tell her that sentence 2 is missing a subject (who or what the sentence is about) and sentence 3 is missing a predicate (what the subject is doing), and that all sentences need both parts to be complete.

Once she’s shown an understanding, I’ll give her worksheets to practice identifying complete and incomplete sentences.

When she’s done, I’ll hand her a piece of lined paper and have her write 10 sentences for me.

I’ll give her nouns and verbs to use as prompts, and a sentence pattern to help her write with (and remember the) correct structure.

The sentence pattern I have her use is: Subject + Verb + Object.

(You can learn more about the pattern here.)

And that’s the exercise I give my students when I teach them sentence structure. 

Give it a try.

Do you want free grammar worksheets? Grab some from my website here.