Opposites in a Sentence: Finish It with the Opposite Word

Each of the six rows on this 1st grade opposites-in-a-sentence page begins with a short sentence built around not: The snail is not fast. The feather is not heavy. Max is not sad today. The lemon is not sweet. The snowflake is not hot. The moon is out, it is not day. A picture of the snail, feather, face, lemon, snowflake or moon sits at the left of the row, and under the sentence a second line waits to be finished: It is ______. The child writes the opposite of the word after not — slow, light, happy, sour, cold, night — choosing from a six-word bank in a dashed box at the top. Six sentences, six bank words, no word used twice.

The not-frame turns an isolated word pair into a piece of grammar the child already uses: if something is not fast, it is slow. That is a different skill from matching words on cards, because the child has to locate the key word inside a sentence, hold its meaning, and produce the partner in a new sentence. The picture beside each row confirms the answer without giving the word away — the snail looks slow, the lemon looks sour. The teacher is listening for the child to read the whole first sentence aloud before writing; the word after not is the only word that matters, and finding it is the reading work.

Print one per child; the handwriting rule in each row is a full three-line guide, so this doubles as a sentence-copying page. The base write-the-opposite page practices the same pairs on bare cards without a sentence, and the pair-up page removes the bank so the child finds both words of each pair alone. Use this page after the cards and before the pair-up.