SENTENCE BUILDING DOMINOES

💡 Try these 6 simple and fun ideas to learn English with dominoes:

1️⃣ Sentence Building

Offer each group of students a pile of dominoes, and invite them to build sentences. Ask them to add adjectives, adverbs, and other parts of speech to make longer, more interesting sentences.
As students build their sentences, remind them that they can use the word-endings dominoes (-s, -ed, -ing) to make it easier or to change the meaning of the sentence. You can also use index cards with “recipes” for sentences such as: “Make a sentence with three nouns, a verb, two adjectives, and a preposition.”

2️⃣ Silly Sentences

Create simple sentences. Then amuse students by suggesting to replace one or more of the nouns or verbs in the sentence to make a silly sentence. Write down their silly sentences and then illustrate them. 

3️⃣ What's Missing?

Display several dominoes to make a “sentence,” but leave
out one of the words. Be sure to begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark. 

Have your child read the sentence aloud, identify what is wrong with it, and find a domino that will complete the sentence correctly. Continue to make sentences with missing words and complete them. Now, challenge your child to make “missing word” sentences. Take turns guessing which domino is missing.

4️⃣ Scrambled Sentences

Let your students work in pairs. Ask them to set up a barrier, such as an open book, so they can't see each other’s work. Each student chooses several dominoes that form a sentence, then scramble the words. Now the partner has to unscramble the sentence created. Take turns making and unscrambling the sentences. It's best to start with short, simple sentences first.

5️⃣ Word families!

Ready for more of a challenge? Try using the dominoes to practice word families (words that rhyme and are spelled with the same ending).

Pull out dominoes for word families you’d like students to practise (you may want to target word families that end in -ear, -ice, -est, or another phonics pattern that is tricky). Next, invite a student to pull a domino from that pile and write 3-4 words that are in that same word family! For example, if he/she pulls the “best” domino, then they may write: rest, pest, vest. These are all words that end in -est.

6️⃣ Sorting parts of speech!

These dominoes include color coded verbs, nouns, adjectives, and more. If your students are learning the parts of speech, invite them to sort a pile of words into nouns and adjectives!