Sentence building cards
These free printable sentence building cards are perfect for making learning fun. With these cards, children and ESL learners can construct grammatically correct sentences in a hands-on and visual way.
The cards have been color-coded to help show students the different parts of sentences and parts of speech. There are nouns (red), verbs (yellow), articles (blue), adjectives (green), and prepositions (pink). Note that the verbs are in the past simple form, some different verb forms might be added at a later date along with pronouns, conjunctions etc.
You will want to make several sets of these cards, depending on your class sizes. Although it takes a bit of time to cut all the pieces out, if you laminate them or print the pages on card stock you can get a lot of use out of them. You can store the sets in envelopes for safekeeping until you need them next.
How to use the sentence building cards
Once you have printed the free pages and cut the cards out, there are lots of activities you can do with them.
Firstly, you can simply give a set of the cards to each student or put them in small groups and let them go about making their own sentences. Kids love building sentences this way. Just be sure to monitor for any mistakes and correct them.
Younger students may need a grammar formula provided to help them. This is where the color-coded cards also help.
Here is a list of some other great activities and games that the sentence building cards can be used in –
- Make silly sentences – Creating absurd sentences is hilarious fun and always gets a laugh. The main thing is to make sure that the sentences have the correct grammar. Check out the silly sentence worksheets for more information on this idea.
- Sentence race game – You can either write a sentence on the board or say it out loud. Students are to race each other to find the right cards and construct the sentence correctly. The first student to do so wins a point. This also works well with students in small groups or teams.
- Longest sentence – See who or which team can create the longest sentence that is grammatically correct.
- Make the sentence from letters – In this activity, the teacher provides the first letter for each word in a sentence. Students are to find the words amongst the cards and put the sentence together. An example might be – TKCUABM = The king climbed up a big mountain. There can be variations on the acronyms, just make sure the sentences are correct.
- Describe the picture – Draw a picture on the board and get students to make a sentence with the cards that describe it. You could also prepare pictures to project if you don’t feel confident channelling your inner Da Vinci. Just make sure the words required are in the card set.
