Sentences for child

How To Make The Most Of Simple Sentences For Kids

When a child finally learns how to construct their own simple sentences, for kids (and parents!), it’s a really special moment.

Word combinations such as “knee sore” turn into, “Mommy, my knee is sore.” Or “now juice” develops into, “Can I have some juice?”

There’s no denying the importance of sentences — they help us better express our thoughts and feelings. So the only question now is: How can you help your child start constructing their own sentences so that they, too, can communicate better?

Two words: simple sentences.

When Do Kids Start Forming Sentences?

Children start forming sentences once they know a few words. But language development is quite a journey!

Somewhere between 18 and 24 months, a toddler will begin constructing two-word “sentences,” like “want milk” or “no sleep.” At this stage, they are linking two or more words together to express an idea. This is the first step and a big milestone.

By four years old (sometimes earlier), most children are speaking in complete sentences. But that doesn’t mean they’ve reached the end of their sentence journey.

While your child may be speaking in complete sentences, finding playful ways to expose four and five year olds to sophisticated aspects of sentences while being kid appropriate is beneficial. This will help them continue developing their language skills.

One of the best ways to do so is to encourage children to speak in complex sentences to express their ideas. How? This can be achieved by simply resisting the temptation to simplify our own speech.

Remember that children are learning sponges! They will naturally pick up on the language habits you expose them to. So, continue speaking in complex sentences while in their presence. It’s not a bad thing if your child asks, “What does that mean?”

Of course, simple sentences come first.

What Makes A Simple Sentence?

A simple sentence is the most basic form of a sentence. It contains only one independent clause — a group of words that forms a complete thought and is made up of a subject and predicate (which includes a verb and expresses what is said about the subject).

For example, in the simple sentence, Thomas kicks the ball, “Thomas” is the simple subject and “kicks the ball” is the predicate, with “kicks” being the verb, or simple predicate.

Simple sentences for kids are mostly short, but they can also be long. The length of the sentence isn’t the focus. What’s important is that the basic elements (subject and predicate) are always present.

When we communicate in our everyday lives, there’s usually a good mixture of both simple and more complex sentences without us even thinking about it. In order to help our kids reach this effortless communication stage, we need to help them understand the basics.

The good thing about the English language (and every other language, actually!) is that once you understand the basics, moving on to complicated structures is easier.

Simple Sentences For Kids To Act Out

One of the best ways for children to learn is through acting things out. If you have an active young child who enjoys moving around, why not use their energy to encourage some learning?

Here are some simple sentences for kids they will have fun acting out.

He reads a book.
The dog barks.
The cat sits on the mat.
I hop on one foot.
The pig gobbles his food.
The rooster crows.

With these sentences for kids, your child will have a blast while naturally learning what makes up a sentence!

Other Ways To Practice Sentences For Kids

1) Use Pictures

We recommend having your child use pictures to make up stories. You can even record the stories and listen to them for a little added fun!

If your child wants to write their ideas, too, that’s great! But don’t worry about standard spelling; much more important is the creative effort involved in thinking of a great story composed of interesting sentences of their own creation.

You can use pictures of animals, nature, sports, or even family photos. Then encourage your child to share whatever comes to their mind after having a look at these images.

During the first session, your child may need a few verbal prompts to help them get started. Simple questions like, “What’s happening in the picture?” or “What does this image remind you of?” can help to get their creativity flowing.

If you have multiple children, you can allow them to share what they came up with about the same image. As individuals, they will most likely think of different sentences, so this is a great opportunity to emphasize how everyone has unique ideas.

We encourage you to allow your children creative freedom here. The idea is to place an image in front of them and let them create anything they feel like creating.

2) Play Sentence Games

If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you’ll know one thing for sure — the HOMER team loves a good game! Games are not only fun, but they’re also great ways to help children remember fundamental learning concepts.

One of our favorite sentence games is Sentence Mix & Match.

What You’ll Need:

Several index cards
Markers to write with

What To Do:

Write interesting subjects on half of the index cards (Ideally, these are things that your child likes. For example: dinosaurs, ice cream, different shapes, colors, etc.).
On the other half, write predicates or sentence endings that make sense with your individual subjects.
After writing, place the cards so that they make realistic sentences.
Then, turn all the cards over and shuffle them. At this point, you want to ensure that you separate sentence beginnings and endings.
After the shuffle, turn your cards over and discover what silly sentences you get.
Remember to begin the subject cards with capital letters and sentence-endings cards with a period.

This is a fun activity to help children see that sentences are not always set in stone. They will also quickly learn that the meaning of a sentence can change when words get moved around.

3) Play With Types Of Sentences

Sentence Mix & Match is not the only way to help children learn sentences for kids while also having fun. Another activity we’re huge fans of is playing with types of sentences. Specifically — statements, questions, and exclamations.

To get started, pick any simple sentence that your child will already be familiar with (e.g., “I like playing outside.”).

Next, encourage your child to say this same sentence as a statement, a question, and then an exclamation.

Similar to Sentence Mix & Match, this game helps children understand that minor tweaks can change the meaning of a sentence.

Children will come across punctuation marks during reading time, but they may not always understand the significance of each. This game will help your child learn how periods, question marks, and exclamation points affect a sentence.

5) Make A Switch

The subject and predicate for each simple sentence have a specific function. For children to use these correctly, they will need to understand what their roles are.

When kids start speaking as babies and then toddlers, they often repeat words, phrases, or the simple sentences they’ve heard from you, your partner, siblings, or other people around them.

At this stage, they haven’t fully grasped the functions of subjects and predicates. If we want to help our children develop their own sentences, we will need to help them understand the roles of these sentence parts.

A creative game they (and you!) will enjoy involves switching the subjects and predicates of a sentence.

Start with a simple three-word sentence, like, “A cat played.” Then take turns changing either the subject or the predicate of the sentence.

This may look something like this:

A cat jumped
A dog jumped
A dog growled
A gerbil growled
A gerbil scampered

Once your young learner is confident switching three-word sentences, move on to four words, five words, and so forth.

Through this fun activity, your child will start understanding the roles of predicates and subjects in sentences.

Simple Sentences For The Win!

A child’s language journey is pretty incredible. It often starts with lots of babbling and moves to single words. Soon, you get two-word combinations, and before you know it, you’re given a detailed account of what happened in class today.

As you’re doing the activities we’ve mentioned, remember to allow your child creative freedom. We know that language has a lot of rules, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun! Encourage your young learner to be as imaginative as they want to be.

For instance, if they write or say, “The lion growls at the dinosaur,” let’s celebrate the correct sentence construction and, for a moment, imagine a world where lions and dinosaurs exist in the same age!

For more fun and effective learning activities, check out the HOMER Learn & Grow app.

Author

How to Help Your Child Use Early Sentences

By Lauren Lowry
Hanen Certified Speech-Language Pathologist and Clinical Staff Writer

It’s really exciting when children start to combine words into little sentences. This big step in their language development usually happens when they are about 30 months old, but it may happen later for children with language delays.
There are many things you can do to help your child learn to use sentences. Whether your child is developing typically or has a language delay, you can talk to your child in a way that encourages his sentence development:

Use short, grammatical sentences

Sometimes people think they can help a child develop sentences by simplifying their own language, but they simplify so much that they eliminate proper grammar (e.g. They might say “Want cookie?”instead of “Do you want a cookie?”, or “Mommy help” instead of “I will help you”).

Children need to hear well-formed sentences with correct grammar in order to learn about the rules of their language.

While using shorter sentences can help young children, they need to hear well-formed sentences with correct grammar in order to learn about the rules of their language. So keep your sentences short but grammatical.

Use longer sentences to encourage understanding

Most children can understand more than they can say. So, you don’t need to keep all of your sentences short. In order to encourage your child’s understanding, you can use sentences that are a bit longer, especially when you are giving instructions or reading books together and talking about the pictures.

Talk about your child’s interests

Follow your child’s lead, observe what he is doing and paying attention to, and talk about whatever has caught his attention. Pause and wait to provide him with many opportunities to try and use words and sentences. If you do all of the talking, he won’t have a chance to practice building sentences.

Build your child’s vocabulary, especially verbs

Children need to know how to say many words in order to combine them into sentences. Using a variety of words when you speak to your child will help your child learn new words. Verbs (action words like “dance”, “fall”, and “pour”) are especially important for building sentences. Find tips on how to build your child’s vocabulary here.

Don’t correct your child’s mistakes

When children start to form sentences they often leave out words or make errors with grammar, and this is perfectly normal. It’s important that children feel encouraged as they start to experiment with combining different words. So instead of correcting your child, repeat what he said, but use the correct grammar. In this way, he hears how the sentence should sound, but isn’t pressured to try to say it.

Expand what your child says

In this way, you acknowledge and encourage your child, but also provide an example that is one small step ahead.

If your child uses a single word or makes a grammatical mistake, you can expand what he said by using his word(s) in a sentence and adding a few words. For example, if your child points to a bird in a tree and says “bird”, you could say “That bird is in the tree!”. If your child wants to play ball with you and says “ball”, you could say “Let’s play ball.” If your child leaves out some of the grammar and says “Daddy go car,” you can expand by adding the correct grammar, “Yes, Daddy is going in the car. He has to go to work.” In this way, you acknowledge and encourage your child, but also provide an example that is one small step ahead that he can learn from.

Use a variety of subjects in your sentences

A sentence needs a subject (a person, place, thing, or idea that is doing something), and children need to hear many examples of subjects in order to learn how to use them themselves. Some early developing subjects are listed below [2]. You can use these subjects in your sentences when you interact and play with your child in the following ways:

“I” – talk about your own thoughts and actions (“I’m hungry” “I see a bird in the tree”)
“you” – talk about your child’s feelings and actions (“You are jumping so high!”)
“he/she/it” – talk about others’ feelings and actions (“He’s fast!” “It feels squishy”)
“we” - talk about things you and your child do together (“We are going to the store”)
the names of people and objects – talk about the toys your child is playing with or characters in books “Teddy is hungry” “The baby is sleeping”)

By using some of these simple tips, you can build your child’s vocabulary and provide examples of early sentences. If you are concerned about your child’s development, talk to your doctor or a speech language pathologist. Our article “When should you seek help?” provides milestones for different ages so that you can determine if your child has developed all of the skills one would expect for his age.

The tips above are adapted from two of our Hanen programs, both of which provide strategies for parents of children who are late in their development of words and early sentences:

It Takes Two to Talk® — The Hanen Program® for Parents of Children with Language Delays – Designed for parents of young children (birth to 5 years of age) who have been identified as having a language delay, this program teaches parents to use natural, day-to-day activities to develop their children’s language skills.

Target Word™ - The Hanen Program® for Parents of Children Who Are Late Talkers – This program was specifically designed for parents of children under the age of 30 months who are using few words or two-word combinations. “Late talkers” understand what they are told, and have good play and turn-taking skills. But when it comes to using words, their vocabulary is limited.

References

Weitzman, E. (2017). It Takes Two to Talk^® (5th ed.). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: The Hanen Centre.
Hadley, P. A., McKenna, M. M. & Rispoli, M. (2018). Sentence Diversity in Early Language Development: Recommendations for Target Selection and Progress Monitoring. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 553-565.

read the offer. Ekaterina Buneeva's home online literacy school

In order for a child to learn to understand a text, you must first work with a separate sentence. What does it mean? This means showing the child how to read all the factual information from the sentence, that is, teaching him to understand what the sentence says directly, explicitly. And then show that a separate sentence can also contain subtext information (something that is not directly stated, but the reader guesses).

The tasks below are suitable for children who can already read. It can be older preschoolers, and first graders, and older children.

1. We teach the child to determine how many words are in a sentence and ask questions to these words. At the same time, we draw attention to the fact that the question can not be asked for every word. For example, in the sentence “Nikita has a machine with control” there are 5 words, and there will be 3 questions, because you cannot ask a question to the prepositions U and C: these words do not mean anything, they help to connect the words in the sentence. What are these questions? 1) Who has a machine with control? 2) What does Nikita have? 3) What kind of car does Nikita have?

But in the sentence “Peter stopped at the crossing”, questions can be asked to all words, except for the preposition U (Who stopped at the crossing? What did Petya do? Where did Petya stop?), and these will be questions for factual information. And you can also ask this: Why did Petya stop at the crossing? This is a question for subtext information. There is no answer to this question in the sentence, but we can guess and assume: either the red traffic light was on, or, if there was no traffic light, Petya stopped because cars were driving along the road. With the help of this exercise, we gradually teach the child to understand that the sentence contains not only information that is reported in finished form, but also that which is hidden “between the lines”, and you also need to be able to read it.

2. We learn to pay attention to word order and put logical stress. For example, we give a sentence where the word order is clearly violated (Children and pencils got the albums.) And we suggest correcting it - swapping words so that the meaning of the sentence becomes clear. And then we ask the child to read the sentence several times, highlighting a different word each time (we learn to put logical stress). For example: CHILDREN took out albums and pencils. If we highlight the word CHILDREN with our voice, this will be the answer to what question? (WHO got the albums and pencils?). Children GET out albums and pencils. And this is the answer to what question? (WHAT DID THE CHILDREN DO?), etc. You noticed that, while dealing with word order and logical stress, we essentially continue to teach how to ask questions to a sentence, but not directly, but through answers.

3. We learn to see words in a sentence that are superfluous in meaning. In order for a child to find an extra word in a sentence, he must think about the meaning of the sentence and understand it. For example, in the sentence “Birds flew in and started nesting very much,” the extra word is very. Why? Here we will be helped by the ability to ask questions to words. The question started (how?) does not make much sense: another word is clearly needed here (immediately, soon ...), but it is not there, which means that the word is VERY superfluous, it needs to be removed.

4. We check how we learned to read sentences: we perform complex tasks. Such tasks suggest that the child first composes a “scattered” sentence, excluding an extra word, and then asks questions to all independent words. For example, given the words: on, strong, was, sea, storm, ship. It is necessary to make a sentence, eliminating the extra word: There was a strong storm at sea. Then determine which words you can ask a question. There are 4 such words (all except for the preposition NA). It turns out 4 questions: What was at sea? Where was the storm? What was the storm? What does it say about a strong storm at sea?

You can come up with a lot of similar tasks, you just need to choose the right sentences. You can always find them in children's books.

Working with a sentence is the first step by which you can teach a child to understand the text. The next steps are the compilation of the text based on the sentence, the comparison of the sentence and the text, and the actual work with the text. It is in this logic that the tasks are built in our training manual “Learning to read and understand the text. Literary reading, Grade 1 (authors E.V. Buneeva, O.V. Pronina, I.V. Kuznetsova, Balass publishing house) The tasks given above are taken from this collection.

In the following publications, I will talk about other methods of working with sentences and texts that are quite accessible to parents and are effective both in individual and group teaching of reading.

We read simple sentences. Glenn Doman's early development methodology. From 0 to 4 years

We read simple sentences. Glenn Doman's early development methodology. 0 to 4 years

WikiReading

Glenn Doman's early development methodology. 0 to 4 years old
Straube E. A.

Contents

Reading simple sentences

Glen Doman offers two ways to teach a child to read simple sentences.

Method 1

Use your 10x45 cm cards to make a set of 5 sentences. You will have to reduce the font size to fit 2-3 words on the card. Therefore, the height of the letters should now be 5 cm instead of 7. 5 cm.

Do not press the words against each other, let there be an empty white space between them so that they can easily “breathe”.

Show them to your child three times a day for no more than five days. Then start updating the set by removing 2 old sentences and inserting 2 new ones. Your child will learn them very quickly, so be ready to move on to new sentences without delay.

Method 2

Make a sentence book. This book will have 5 sentences and 1 illustration for each of them. Its size is 20x45 cm, the size of the red font is 5 cm.

Start with the first ten pages, which you will read to your child two or three times a day. After a few days, make a new chapter based on the same vocabulary.

The book can be illustrated with photographs of the child himself when he performs this or that action. You will get an interesting diary of your child's life, for which all his photographs will be useful. As a rule, children are very fond of such albums and quickly learn the material illustrated by their own images.

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