Are your students struggling with producing complete sentences? Do they just need a little more reinforcement? Try Sentence Scrambles! Sentence Scrambles are an activity that my students love! They are a great way for your students to practice writing sentences and sentence building in a highly engaging and effective way. Sentence scrambles allow students to develop writing skills while practicing sentence structure. They are also great for reinforcing sight word recognition and spelling.

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Need help teaching sentence writing? All the tools to teach writing foundations are ready for you with our brand new Lucky to Learn Writing program! With guided video lessons, hands-on student activities and digital teaching slides, your entire writing plan is laid out for the school year.

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The Lucky Little Learners Sentence Scrambler bundle was recently updated with some awesome new features:

• TWO levels for each sentence
• Word cards & recording pages
• No-prep option with cut & glue words
• Digital option on Google Slides

Practice Sentence Writing

There are so many resources available to help your students improve their sentence writing. Why do we love using Sentence Scrambles? They're super easy to use as an ELA center, small group work, and partner work. Plus, they provide supportive structure and a starting point for reluctant writers.

Let's talk quickly about how to use Sentence Scrambles for a mini small group lesson. First, meet with a small group of students who need support in this skill. Lay the word cards out and let your learners look at them. Then, ask leading questions. What do they notice? How do we begin making sense of this sentence? Guide the conversation towards bookending the sentence with a capital letter and ending punctuation. I've found that practicing “finding the bookends” has helped my students in their own writing so much. When arranging all the other words in the sentence, I use this as an opportunity to work on decoding and comprehension skills with my students.

Remember, Sentence Scrambles come in two levels of difficulty. This means that students who are ready can work on writing complex sentences while those who need the support can stick with writing simple sentences. This way, you are meeting all of your learners right where they are!

How To Use Printed Sentence Scrambles

Step 1

Prep your Sentence Scrambles! Print the words onto colored or white paper then laminate for durability, if you'd like to. Students have a way of mixing things up a bit so there are matching symbols on each word card and the sentence label to help keep them organized. Cut and separate the individual word cards into baggies with their matching label. Once you have a bag for every sentence you're ready to begin!

Step 2

Your students will grab sentence sets and rearrange the word cards to create complete and correct sentences. For students who struggle remind them that the first word in the sentence is going to have a capital letter and the last word will have ending punctuation. Your students will practice sentence writing without the frustration of constant erasing. Once they're happy with the layout of their word cards they move on to recording!

Step 3

Students will use the recording sheet to keep track of the sentences they've completed. They will be copying down the sentence they created with their word cards giving them the opportunity to practice writing sentences in a structured way. This is especially helpful for your “I don't know what to write” reluctant writers. They get the practice they need with one less barrier.

Practice Writing Sentences with the Cut & Paste Version

If you're looking for a no-prep way to practice writing sentences, you found it! These cut & paste Sentence Scramblers are a great choice. Students can be given individual worksheets. They will cut the words from the bottom and glue them in the correct order. My favorite part? The recording sheet has an editing checklist for your students. This way they can self-correct any mistakes in their sentence writing!

How to Use Digital Sentence Scrambles

Finally, if you're looking for a digital way to practice writing sentences, we've taken care of that too! These Google Slides are formatted the same way the Cut & Paste option is. Students will drag and drop the word cards into the correct order then type in the complete sentence. They'll be asked to drag and drop check marks to show they've checked their sentence for errors.

Check Out More Ways to Practice Writing Sentences!

If sentence writing is something your students are struggling with coming at the problem from a bunch of different angles is useful. This post that gives sentence-writing advice from seasoned teachers in our Facebook Group is fantastic. We also have a post dedicated to ideas and sentence-writing activities that will help your students practice and master sentence writing once and for all!

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Need help teaching sentence writing? All the tools to teach writing foundations are ready for you with our brand new Lucky to Learn Writing program!

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