Help Your Child Develop Strong Sentence Structure
Assist Your Kid in Crafting Proper Sentences
Sentence building is a skill that begins with the recognition of the alphabet. Once a child knows her ABCs, she is eager to arrange these alphabets in various ways to create words. And then she puts these words side by side in the proper order to create sentences. It is indeed an exciting process, with rich rewards – helping a child develop the skill of reading and comprehending what she reads.
The first step to help your child build sentences is to make her do verbal exercises. Present three to four words that she recognizes, and encourage her to use them to frame a sentence. Be sure that the words are simple, and known to your child, such as – dog, the, and ran. What a pleasure it is when she puts them together to build a sentence – The dog ran.
The next step is to make her use more words to build a sentence; four to five known words, such as – dog, the, ran, fat, and room. Your child will be able to place them in the proper order, along with other words, to say – The fat dog ran into the room.
Related Topic: Enhancing Your Child’s Writing with Stronger, Expanding Sentences
Reading books together presents more opportunities to hone sentence-making skills. While reading her favorite story, make her choose a few words that she knows. Challenge her to make a sentence using these words, along with other necessary words. For example, while reading The Little Red Hen, she may choose the words ‘red’, ‘hen’, ‘eat’, or ‘seed’. Help her to use these words, along with others, to make a sentence that is not in the story, such as – The red hen will eat the seed.
After oral practice, it’s time for some written words and sentences. Ask your child to open her favorite storybook and choose a sentence that she likes. Write the words that make up the sentence on separate index cards using a colorful marker. Make sure the first word of the sentence has a capital letter.
Ask your child to match each index card with the corresponding word in the sentence. Jumble up the words, and guide her to place them side by side in the proper order to make the sentence. Encourage her to read the sentence aloud, pointing to each word as she reads.
More sentences may be chosen from her favorite books for regular practice.
For more novelty, the index cards of words may be put up on the fridge with the help of magnetic tapes. Your child will have an exciting time, moving the magnetic words, and arranging them in various combinations to make different sentences.
These activities, done daily, will help your child identify word order, which is the basis of sentence-making. And she will be one step nearer to story-making – which, as we all know, is made up of sentences.
If you want to learn more about Indo Scots Global School, Do Feel free to visit Schools in Navi Mumbai Page
