Today I was staying after school to tutor one of our ELLs. He stays after once a week for an hour because we are trying to boost his reading level. However... you can only read so many Reading A-Z books before your eyes start to glaze over. So I usually throw in a game toward the end to wake us both up and to get him conversing with me in English. Also, so he doesn't hate tutoring! :)
I pulled out Silly Sentences today and it was a hit!
I've used this with my own class and they love it! The game gives you little puzzle-type pieces with nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, articles, and punctuation. Each of the pieces has a little notch in a specific spot, so you have to create a sentence in a specific order. This prevents ridiculous mish-moshes of words.
You can use the words to make sentences, either "silly" or normal. However, who wants to make a normal sentence when you can say, "A blue firefighter jumped on a happy cat"?
All of the nouns have pictures to accompany them, and some of the adjectives do also. It's great for vocabulary building!
I haven't used it to teach parts of speech, but you can definitely do that too since each different part of speech is color-coded.
We had a good old time with this today and my second graders play it a lot while the first graders are doing Reading! Definitely worth checking out. :)
