Do your kids need extra practice reading? Or how about some practice with grammar? Silly Sentences is a great game for kids to practice these language arts skills, and have a lot of fun, too!
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Silly Sentences is a fun game for creating sentences. There are 124 pieces that have puzzle-like connections. All the pieces have a red line on the bottom. Make a straight red line through each sentence, to ensure you’re formulating it properly. Nouns have an orange stripe on the top of the piece, adjectives have a blue stripe, prepositions (though they only have “over” and “on”) get a pink stripe, verbs (all past-tense) have a green stripe on top, articles (they only have “a” and “the”, though both capitalized and lower case) have a yellow stripe, and periods have a purple stripe.
All the pieces except the nouns are dealt out. The objective is to use all the pieces in your hand. With each turn, the pieces in your “hand” are reduced by one, unless you choose to use a noun. Any player can take a noun to play for any turn they need to. All the nouns and some of the adjectives (well, the colors) have a picture on the card, but the rest of the pieces are without pictures.
Silly Sentences can encourage reading
If kids are already reading some, this can be a great way to encourage more reading. If they’re not reading at all, though, it’s likely to just cause frustration. (See some of my other recommendations for teaching reading.) Between the pictures on the cards, and the otherwise limited number of options (the verbs consist of “jumped”, “climbed”, “ate”, and “saw”, with multiples of each), this could work with a kiddo who wasn’t reading much yet. However, all the adjectives are unique, and the colors are the only ones that have any clues on the cards.
One thing that’s bothered me about the game is that some words have multiple meanings and/or uses. For example, “saw”. It’s both a noun and a verb, but the game only has it categorized as a verb. While the sentence, “The hairy boy climbed on the green saw.” is grammatically correct (and not really that much of a stretch), it’s not allowed in the game. One of the nouns is also “hero,” but the picture is of a sandwich. For those that don’t live in an area where sub sandwiches are called “heros” (the East coast? Maybe?), it was one thing I had to explain to my PNW-raised kids.
All in all, my kids love this game. They love seeing just how silly they can make their sentences, and it certainly encourages reading. If you’re still not sure, though, head on over to our youtube channel and watch us play through the game.