The Sentence Zone
Price: $67.00
If you’re looking for a fun way to improve writing and grammar skills, this game is for you! For 2 to 6 players, grades 1st and up. Rules are easily mastered. The Sentence Zone can be played at six levels – from Level 1 in which the player builds a subject and verb sentence, to Level 6 in which the player builds complex sentences with independent and dependent clauses. With over 500 color coded cards, students are sure to be unique and entertaining every time. A great reinforcing individual activity where a player keeps track of their score from day to day, trying to top their previous score, or a great group activity where competition drives creativity and learning. An instructive and enjoyable way to shatter the tedium of English grammar lessons!
Overwhelmed With English Grammar?
Challenged by English Grammar or Sentence Writing?
Does your child come home and struggle with an English grammar assignment?
Does your child write short paragraphs that contain short sentences?
Does your child have trouble writing a sentence?
A number of years ago one of my 6th grade students was really struggling with his English grammar homework. He had the typical assignment of underlining the subject of the sentence once and the verb of the sentence twice. That was hard for him.
The second part of the assignment was to put a box around the direct object and circle the subjective complement in the sentence. This totally stymied him. He didn’t even know what a subjective complement was. It was completely beyond him! And, then the third set of sentences in his assignment told him to identify the indirect object. English all of a sudden was a foreign language as far as he was concerned.
He threw up his arms and declared, ” Who cares? And why is any of this important anyway?”
The fact is good writers use a variety of sentence types in their writing. When you are aware of the different types of sentences and use different types of sentences in your writing, your writing is more interesting. Understanding how we put words together into the different types of sentences also helps you to write more clearly. You don’t have partial sentences or run-on sentences. Instead, you have clear concise sentences.
After years of trial and error I came upon a method to help my students out. I changed the directions their text used by having them use colored pencils. Instead of underlining the subjects once and the verbs twice, I had my students underline the subjects in their sentences with a blue colored-pencil and underline the verbs in their sentences with a red colored-pencil as they identified them. This worked a lot better, but they still didn’t get the connections of the parts of speech and the role the words play in the sentence.
For instance nouns can be used in many different ways. You are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, a mom or a dad, a son or a daughter; you can also be an employee, a boss, a student, an aunt or an uncle depending upon which role you are engaged in. BUT, you are always the same person. It depends on where you are which defines the role you play at any given moment in time. You are always a noun because a noun is the name of a person, thing, quality, or idea. Nouns can be the subject, the direct object, the subjective compliment, or the predicate nominative, depending on the place it is used in the sentence.
When I explained English grammar in those terms, my students understood that nouns could be used in many different ways. Just as they are a student at school, a soccer player on the soccer field, and a son or daughter at home. My students started getting the concept but they still didn’t like having to do English assignments. So, the trick became teaching grammar and the six basic types of sentences in an engaging activity.
I had learned from recent research on learning, memory, and the brain that color helped memory retention. I also knew how games help students learn in a stress free environment. This made me realize that I needed to create a game that was color-coded to teach grammar. The Sentence Zone® game is that result. It would teach and reinforce English grammar and sentence structure at the same time.
When I first began playing The Sentence Zone® with one of my 6th grade students I would win each time. Then all of a sudden, she was beating me! When that happened, I looked back at her writing over that period of time and saw that her writing had also improved. Now her writing was clear and interesting. The sentences were no longer all of the same type and they were much more descriptive! Needless to say, it was an exciting discovery.
After several months using The Sentence Zone®, I took it into an ESL 1st/2nd grade classroom. The ESL teacher didn’t think her students would be able to play it. She thought it would be way too difficult. To her amazement, the students not only played it and played it well, they wouldn’t leave until she promised them they could play it again the next day.
A few years after developing The Sentence Zone®, I attended a workshop on Sentence Writing Strategies based on the research from the University of Kansas (SIM Strategies).
To my surprise, the sentence writing strategy they used was the same one I had been using with The Sentence Zone®, teaching the 6 basic sentence types. This was so cool to me because now there was years of research backing up my work, my game.
The SIM Strategy workshop I attended spent a lot of time showing us how to teach the sentence writing strategy to high school students. Up to this time The Sentence Zone® used the 500 most frequently used words. I decided if my high school students were to become engaged in the game they would need more difficult vocabulary words so they could make sentences they would be interested in. So, I added 100 advanced vocabulary cards to the basic vocabulary cards so they could make more sophisticated sentences.
Patricia Lara, a coach for high school students preparing to take the SAT, started using the game to teach parallel sentence structure and the role of interrupting phrases. The students loved it and really understood sentence structure for the first time. And, their SAT grammar scores started rising.
- Today is the day you can shatter the tedium of English Grammar for your child!
- Your child can really understand for the first time how we put words together to make 6 different types of sentences.
- Your child can now write interesting paragraphs like the best writers do, using a variety of sentence types in their writing.
- Your child’s teacher will be amazed at the change in your child’s writing. They may even use your child’s work as an example for the class to follow.
Order Now and your child will be on their way to taking their writing to a new level!
The Sentence Zone
Price: $67.00
Guarantee
As with all Bonnie Terry Learning Products, The Sentence Zone comes with a 60 Day Money Back No Questions Asked Guarantee.
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