Replace the Name with a Pronoun

Eight sentence pairs run down this 1st grade page. The first sentence of each pair names someone and says what they do — Ben and Leo ride a bike, Tom draws a cat, Lily plays with a ball — and the second repeats it with a dashed box where the name stood. A small bank at the top holds three words: She, They and He. The child writes the one that replaces the name. Five of the eight sentences name one person and three name two.

Printing the two sentences one above the other is what shows the substitution rather than describing it: the second line is the first line with a single change, and the child can see exactly which word has gone. Every pronoun in the bank is capitalised because each one starts its sentence, which is a small piece of convention picked up along the way. With three words and eight rows each pronoun is used more than once, so the bank is a reminder and not a checklist.

One sheet, eight pairs, eight words. It is the first writing face of the pronouns family and the natural step after the circle-the-word page, since the same three words move from a chip to a pen. The rewrite face at 2nd grade asks for the whole sentence instead of the one word.