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If you've ever read my blog you probably know about Scrambled Sentences. It's a grammar material I've created for my students to help them work with word order in various grammar structures. This is what it looks like and how it works:
My students find his material very useful and I can see they're improving in their speaking and writing skills.
I noticed, however, that they still struggled with seeing the correspondence between positive statements, negative statement and questions. They would know how to say "She starts lessons at 8 o'clock"; they would know how to say "Does she start lessons at 8 o'clock?"; but for some reason they had no idea how to change one sentence into the other. They needed something more to see the connection ... so I made it đ
It's kind of an add-on task for Scrambled Sentences. It's extremely easy to use and it works wonders on my kids' understanding of grammar and syntax.
The task is simple: once the student arranges all the sentences and checks if they are correct, he or she then chooses 4 sentences, copies them into a notebook and adds the remaining types of sentences! Once they're done they check their answers on this:
If you've ever worked with Scrambled Sentences you know that that each set is composed of 7 sentences. So above you can see the answers for Present Simple set 1. In set 1 all the sentences are positive statements and that's why they're in red. The remaining forms of the sentence are negative statement and questions and those are the ones that students need to come up with on their own. You can also see that the answers are colour coded: they correspond to the colour of each sentence from the set.
I ask my students to do only 4 sentences but you can ask them to do all 7 or just 1. It's completely up to you.
This task is especially useful with Present Simple, where the changes between positive statements, negative statement and questions are more complicated than with, let's say Present Continuous. I'm taking of course about the he/she/it -s- suffix in positive statements and lack thereof in negative statements and questions.
Like I said - crazy easy yet effective drilling. Because that's what it is, no point sugar coating it đ đ
If you own Scrambled Sentences you can simply download the add-ons and ... well ... add it đ to your set.
If you don't yet own Scrambled Sentences you can get all the sets in Monteshop. The Bundle is currently on sale. Use the "Scrambled bundle" code at the check out đ
The Present Simple set has add-ons for sets 1-6. The other sets have adverbs of frequency in them and the whole thing was getting too complicated for the kids. Like changing the sentence "Our dog sometimes runs away from home" into a negative just sounds unnatural: "Our dog doesn't sometimes run away from home". Grammatically correct but just weird.
If there's a set composed fully of open-ended questions I would skip it entirely. If there is a set where open-ended questions are among other structures I put a dash (-) in other types of sentences to point out that it cannot be changed. If you don't know what I mean, you'll understand when you download the add-ons and see for yourselves.
Drill away good people
Have fun creating,
Ewa :)