Unscramble the Sentence: The Capital and End Mark Are Left In

Three rows, three fruits, three sentences in pieces. A pomegranate, a blueberry and a banana sit at the left of their own cream row on this 1st grade sentence-building page, and beside each one a line of white word tiles waits out of order: this, pomegranate?, Is, your. Two tiles in every row are marked. One carries a capital letter and one carries the period or question mark, so the beginning and the end of the sentence are given away before the child starts. Underneath each row is a three-line handwriting rule for writing the sentence out.

Leaving the clues in narrows the puzzle to the middle. The child can place the capitalized tile first and the punctuated tile last without reading anything, then spend all the effort on the words in between, which is where the grammar lives. It also teaches what those two marks are for: a tile reading pomegranate? announces that the sentence will ask rather than tell, and a child who notices reads the row in a questioning voice and finds the order faster. Trying orders aloud is the method, and it is audible from across the room.

Print the PDF free and have the child number the tiles lightly in pencil before writing anything on the lines. If a row will not come, cutting the tiles out and moving them physically usually settles it in seconds. The no clues version prints sentences of the same kind with every tile in lowercase and the end mark removed, so both ends of the sentence have to be decided as well as the middle. Fix the sentence is the page along from this one, where the words are already in order and only the mechanics are missing.