Classroom Activities: Types of Sentences

These classroom activities are designed to complement the Types of Sentences topic on BrainPOP Jr.

Together watch or read an interview together. Review with your children that in an interview someone asks questions and the other person responds with an answer. The questions can be serious or they can be light-hearted and silly. Group students into pairs and have each person write down a list of questions he or she would like to ask the partner. Encourage your students to start their questions with words other than who, what, where, when, why, how or do. You may want to give a list of starting words on the board for their questions. Then have partners ask each other the questions and write down their answers. Remind your students to capitalize the first letter of the sentence and use the correct end punctuation. Pairs may wish to swap papers and proofread each other’s work.

Say Please
Review with your students that a command is a direction or an order to do something. Have a student write a command to do something in the classroom. Remind the student to “say please.” Have the student share his or her command with the class or write it on the board, making sure to use proper capitalization and punctuation. Then ask a volunteer to follow the command. Continue this process until everyone in the class has a chance to write and follow a command.

Surprise!
Remind your children that an exclamation is a sentence that shares a strong feeling, such as happiness, anger, or surprise. Stage a mock surprise party and have students write an exclamation about how they feel, such as “Wow!” or “I’m excited!” Students can write their sentences on the board and use proper capitalization and punctuation. Then take one student’s exclamation and turn it into a statement by replacing the exclamation mark with a period. How does this change the sentence? How does the feeling expressed in the sentence change? Discuss with your students how punctuation can change the message of a sentence.