Fun Sentence Writing Activities for Your Child

Do you struggle sometimes to get your child to write sentences?  

That’s not unusual. Putting pencil to paper to create an essay or paragraph or even a sentence takes a certain amount of courage, creativity, and a conscious effort.

But there is hope.

Activities that have structure, choice, and sometimes a bit of randomness can make writing a little less stressful for children.

Here is a collection of simple sentence writing activities designed to take some of the stress off of your child and make the amassing of words into a more enjoyable experience.

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Fun Sentence Writing Activities

Build a Sentence

Here’s an activity that will help your child build sentences bit by bit and reinforce the parts of speech.  Your child will need paper and pencil for this activity.

First, tell him to think of a person or thing that the sentence is about and write that word in about the middle of the line.  I know that sounds odd, but trust me on this one.  This first word is a noun.

                                                       hippopotamus                                                                                  

Second, tell him to write an action that the person or thing is doing after it.  This is the verb and can be in any tense so long as it agrees with the noun.

                                                       hippopotamus dives                                                                      

Third, he should write one or two describing words before the noun.  These are adjectives.  He might also want to add the word “The” if necessary.

      The purple, polka-dotted hippopotamus dives                                                                      

Fourth, he can add a word after the verb which describes how the action was done.  This word is called an adverb and usually ends with an “ly”.  If he struggles with this, you might need to offer suggestions.  You can also get some ideas from the books mentioned at the end of the article.

      The purple, polka-dotted hippopotamus dives gallantly                                                         

Finally, he can complete his sentence with words or phrases that answer the questions “When?” or “Where?” or “Why?”  He can use as many of these as he wants so long as it doesn’t make a run-on sentence.  Tell him to put an appropriate punctuation mark at the end of his sentence.

      The purple, polka-dotted hippopotamus dives gallantly into the mud every morning.    

There you go.  Your child has just made a long descriptive sentence.  Let him be silly with this if he wants to.  It will make it more enjoyable for him and then he’ll want to write even more. 🙂

Pick Words

You might want to try this activity for younger children or children who struggle with thinking up words.

You will need 5 containers like butter tubs, coffee cans or paper bags.  Label each container with one of these words: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Phrases.

Then you will need small pieces of paper to write the words or phrases on.  They can be plain white or color-coded to match each container.

Sit down with your child and brainstorm about 10 – 15 words that will go in each container.  Write one word or phrase on each small piece of paper.  Here are some suggestions for each one.

• Nouns: aardvark, clown, rainbow, computer, your child’s name
• Verbs: flip, dance, munch, yodel, hiccup
• Adjectives: striped, magenta, itsy-bitsy, scrawny, sleepy
• Adverbs: boldly, merrily, excitedly, miraculously, lightly
• Phrases: over the stump, under the moonbeams, every weekend, in the lake, on Christmas

Fold each piece of paper twice so the word can’t be seen and toss it into its container.  Now the fun begins.

Let your child draw one paper from each container and create a silly sentence from the words.  Here’s how it might look.  Suppose he draws “aardvark”, “yodel”, “itsy-bitsy”, “boldly”, and “under the moonbeams”.  He could write a sentence like this:

The itsy-bitsy aardvark yodeled boldly under the moonbeams.

Verbs can be in any tense so long as they agree with the noun.  If he draws a verb that needs a direct object, like munch, he can draw an extra noun.  Then he might have a sentence like this:

The striped clown munched a rainbow excitedly in the lake.  

Get it?

This activity can be used for fun dictation sentences as well.  In that case, you can pull the words from the containers and assemble them into humorous phrases to dictate to your child.

Describe a Picture

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Well, here’s a chance for your child to write as many words as he can about a picture.  

Find a photograph or work of art.  Tell your child to write as many sentences as he can to describe the picture.  Tell him to think about what he would see, hear, taste, smell, and touch if he were actually in the image.  This will make it a more imaginative experience for him.

Colorful, Inspirational Books About Parts of Speech

Do you want to share some creative vocabulary with your child and teach him parts of speech too?  Then you might want to look at the books written by Ruth Heller.  This author/illustrator beautifully blends grammar, vocabulary and incredible artwork in a fun way for children.  I highly recommend her work.  Here are some books she has written:

• Many Luscious Lollipops: A Book About Adjectives
• Kites Sail High: A Book About Verbs
• Merry-Go-Round: A Book About Nouns
• A Cache of Jewels and Other Collective Nouns
• Up, Up and Away: A Book About Adverbs
• Fantastic! Wow! and Unreal!: A Book About Interjections and Conjunctions
• Mine, All Mine!: A Book About Pronouns
• Behind the Mask: A Book about Prepositions

I hope these sentence writing activities helped your child to become more confident with writing. If they worked for you, feel free to share this post with other homeschoolers.

Many blessings,