Sentence Building (SVO) Picture Cards

A good small group or 1:1 activity when working with children who need to develop their sentence building, particularly useful for EAL and SEN children. A common target set by SALTs for children who have speech and language difficulties is to work on developing their subject + verb + object sentences, and this is a good way to approach it. There are 36 cards showing various subjects (boy, girl, dog, cat etc) doing various verb actions such as sitting, walking, drinking, jumping, writing, reading, eating and sleeping. I usually place all the cards face down on the table and get the children to pick a card and then describe the picture (ie The boy is sleeping in bed) and then post them into one of my home made post boxes, or alternatively, they can see how many cards they can collect. I have found this an excellent way of practicing sentence building and once confident you can encourage them to expand sentences to include adjectives.