Rewrite the Sentence with a Pronoun

Eight sentences are printed one to a row on this 2nd grade page, each with a picture of the people it names and a set of three-line handwriting rules beneath it. The sheet shown runs Ben rides a bike, Jack and Anna jump rope, Ava and Zoe eat an apple, Tom and Leo play with a ball, Max goes to the park, Lily feeds the dog, Eli paints a picture and Emma builds a tower. The child writes each sentence out again with a pronoun in place of the name.

This is the only face in the pronouns family that asks for a whole sentence, and copying the rest of it is not busywork: the capital letter moves on to the pronoun, the full stop has to be kept, and a child who writes he rides a bike with a small h discovers what the frame was doing for them on the earlier pages. No pronoun is offered anywhere on the sheet, so the word has to come from the child.

One sheet, eight sentences, twenty-four lines. It is the longest page in the family to complete and the one that shows most clearly whether the idea has landed. Print it last, after the circling, the single-word and the reference faces; four of the eight sentences name two people, so they comes up as often as he and she together.