Jumbled letters, jumbled words.

Choose your sentence

John quickly left just before the man woke,

Now change the letters between words. Change the first letter of each word with the last letter of the word in front and vice versa.

Johq nuickll yefj tusb tefort ehm eaw noke

Now mix up the words

ehm tefort noke nuickll Johq yefj eaw tusb

Starting from Just students should be able to work out the order of the words if they can recognize the spelling. So if they recognize ‘Johq’, they know they need to look for an n to replace the q. they also know that the next word begins with q. They know that John is the first word because the first letter, j is correct. This means there is no other word in front of it.

Mixed double sentences

Write two sentences

He plays football with his friends every Friday after school

I am cycling to Brighton this weekend with the cycle club

cycling he with his friends school after I am plays to this weekend the cycle club   football every Friday Brighton with

Mix all the words up an write them on the board

Divide the class two teams, A and B

Write ten spaces for each sentence.

A____   _____   ______   ______   _____    ______   _______  _____  _______  _______

B____ _____   ______   _______   _____    ______ _______ _____ _______ _______

Teams take it in turns to nominate words which they think belong to their sentence. Each word they nominate correctly is written in its place. However, if they nominate a word from the other team’s sentence, it is written in the appropriate place in the other team’s sentence. The first team to finish their sentence wins. This is good for contrasting structures e.g. simple vs. continuous, active vs. passive, present perfect vs. past.

Newspaper sentences

Here’s an activity for more advance learners. Give one newspaper between two students. They have to make a sentence using words from the paper as follows:  The first person chooses one word from the first page, the next from the second page, the first from the third page and so on. Alternatively use text books, reading passages (alternate paragraphs)