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Silly Sentences

By making up absurd sentences it makes children’ ‘tune’ in to the vocabulary and meaning (or nonsense) being generated.  They can then go on to make up their own for each other.

Use them as part of a Silly Sentence Week (or fortnight / half term). Post one on the whiteboard or wall of the classroom.  Children have to talk about and/or write down what is ‘silly’ about the sentence.  Can they think of substitute words that would make it ‘Unsilly’?

Examples

• My mum went to the garage and poured milk into her fuel tank.’
• The underwater cameraman would only ever wear a blue parachute.
• My brother is going to fly to America in his wooden spaceship.
• I put my double bass into my pocket and set off for the concert.

Another twist on this is to ‘make’ a Random Sentence Generator machine which children help you to invent and use.

E.g. You put in two nouns, a verb and an adjective (or a variation on those). Children have to come up with a sentence which includes all of those words. (It is allowed to change the tense or form of the verb.)

These ‘Generator Challenges’ could be written on to cards that you give to groups/pairs of children to work on. They can include other words of their own and then post them back into the machine.

You can make it easier for some children  - a generator machine that can only cope with two or three words at a time.

Make it more difficult for other children by asking them to generate a compound or complex sentence – or use a particular piece of punctuation.

e.g. Put in coffee  goldfish  hot,  cycles.  My goldfish hates hot coffee so cycled to the local lake to cool down.

Homonyns – Which is the FAKE?

Put up a list of homonyms – at least three for each one (see examples below).  Give children dictionaries and ask them to work in teams /pairs. They have to decide which is the odd one out for each trio of homonyms.

Extension tasks would be to make up a sentence for each of the ‘correct’ ones. Points can be awarded for each correct use of a homonym

Further fun could be had by making up a dictionary definition for the ‘Fake’ Homonyms.

If you like these ideas, there are many more in the digital download  'It's a Case of Grammar!'