Silly Sentences is an easy game which is ideal as a 5 minute filler activity at the end of the lesson. It practices sentence structure and vocabulary.

Method of Play

As the teacher, you write on the board a few random letters (or draw them from a bag of Scrabble letters), e.g.

b a d w

The students then have 3 minutes to write down as many sentences as they can. The catch is that each word of the sentence must begin with the letters you wrote on the board and in that order. For example:

Bunnies are dangerous writers.

Ben ate disgusting weeds.

Bring a deadly weapon.

The person with the strangest or cleverest sentence wins a point for their team.

Variations

You can make the game harder by increasing the number of letters you write. You can also vary the game by specifying what one of the words must be:

k p h bananas

Giving rise to:

Keep painting Harry’s bananas.

Kevin peels hairy bananas.

And so on.

Finally, the game can, of course, be used as an introduction to a lesson on sentence structure. The students can be taught how the position of certain words are likely to indicate their function, e.g. the first word in a sentence is probably the subject.

Useful Links

Sentences‏‎ in English Grammar – all about sentences and how they are formed.