I have several clients who have significant difficulty creating grammatical correct sentences during conversational speech. Two of them have goals for sequencing a group of words to make a sentence. We’ve used some great worksheets from Linguisystem’s No Glamour Grammar books. But after awhile, we were starting to get a little bored. One thing I noticed was that they didn’t seem to have a good understanding of how sentences worked. For example, when trying to sequence the words in a sentence, they didn’t seem to understand that the noun is generally followed by a verb. If I asked them to define different parts of speech, it seemed very difficult for them.
I had seen a recipe for Microwave Eggs at Makelearningfun.com that I’d planned to use with an AAC client. For some reason, I started thinking of scrambled eggs and scrambled sentences which let me to my latest project: A balanced breakfast: Scrambled Sentences. I started by using a power point presentation to introduce the different parts of speech and demonstrate how they can help you give more information to the listener.
To introduce this, I usually have the student close their eyes and try to picture the sentence (or draw if we have time.) It usually goes something like this:
Okay, I want you to picture this:
“cat walks.”
Okay now I want you to picture, “Gigantic cat walks.”
Got that? Now I want you to picture, “Gigantic cat walks quickly.”
We can go on for awhile or I may end it with something silly. “Gigantic cat walks quickly up to your mom and says hello.”
We talk about how different the first picture we made in our mind is from the last picture.
Now that they have an idea, we start working on creating our own sentences. For this activity we used the breakfast vocabulary theme.
