Sentence Showdown + October Centers

September 15, 2013

Happy Sunday! I thought I’d pop in today and share a great group activity that I did last week. It worked really well with my kiddos. We have been learning about declarative and interrogative sentences. This is a complete change for the kids because our last reading series called them statements and questions so I’ve had to do lots of teaching about what each word means.

To practice recognizing the sentences, I put the kids in group and had them do a sort.

 To prepare, I put all the things the kids would need in a pencil box. This saves some time in the long run because they are rummaging for their scissors or glue in their desks.

Each group also got half of a piece of drawing paper. You could also do half of a piece of poster board. I also went ahead a glued down the headers that they would be using for the sort. In second grade, they aren’t very good judges of how much space they need to save for each section. I’ve learned the hard way from having to pull up lots of things that they’ve glued down and tearing the paper in the process.

We started our review by gluing down the descriptors for each type of sentence. 

 After that, we did a whole class sort and put the sentences where they need to go on our whole class chart. 
After we finished the sort, I divided the groups into fours and fives. Each group was already selected by me and typed on a piece of paper. Here is a screenshot of what the paper looked like. I removed the names of my students for this image. Before each group started on their sort, they had to decide on their jobs. I like to give each child a job in a group so one child doesn’t just take over and do the entire job. For this task, the jobs were fairly simple.
After they decided on their jobs, the kids had to read each sentence on their sheet and use the marker to add the ending punctuation mark. I gave each group enough sentences so they all had to mark one.
After they were done sorting and gluing, the presenter shared why they decided to put the sentences where they were on the paper.

This week, we are learning about Imperative and Exclamatory sentences and we will be doing this same activity.
You can get a copy of the Declarative/Interrogative sort and the Imperative/Exclamatory sort on my Facebook page.
You have to be a fan to grab the freebies. Once you are a fan, click on Facebook Fan Freebies and you will find the files there.

In other news, I posted my new October centers yesterday. Click on any of the images to view on TPT.

Enjoy your day!

 photo SwimmingintoSecondSignature_zpsdbc444f5.png

5 Comments on “Sentence Showdown + October Centers

  1. I love your sentence activities! These will be perfect for my class! Great activity plus these will make wonderful anchor charts. When I was downloading them I found your AR points product too~ perfect! Thanks so much for sharing your wonderful ideas!

    Nancy (www.funtimeinfirst.com)

  2. Not complaining at all so please don't take this as negative. I always have a couple of Jehovah Witness children in my class and I feel uneasy about having holiday themed centers. Does anyone else have this issue? Do you still do the centers and have an option for the 2? Do you not use the cute, motivating centers in fear of offending the 2? I usually avoid these and just do plain centers or generic like fall leaves, snowflakes, etc. Any of your opinions would be appreciated.

    1. I've never had that problem. This is actually the first year that I have a child who is a Jehovah Witness. I am going to give this student the option to do these centers or do another set.

Comments are closed.