Mixed up Sentences: An English Grammar Activity

Skills: Reading/writing

Materials required: Sentences, white board/PowerPoint

Put up a “Mixed-Up” conversation or a few unrelated sentences on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation. The students then have to turn them into coherent English. Mixed up Sentences is an excellent English grammar activity that can be used to review concepts studied in previous classes.

Teaching Tips:

If your goal is to practice specific grammar points, it will probably be faster to make your own dialogue or sentences than to repurpose one from the book. However, if your students are beginners or high beginners, simply arranging a set of sentences in the correct order of a conversation may be challenging. In that case, you can save yourself some time by recycling a textbook dialogue which you covered several weeks or months earlier.

Procedure:

1. In advance, prepare a conversation using familiar vocabulary, or take a dialogue from a previous, but not too recent, lesson. Randomly arrange the sentences, or parts of sentences, if you want to make it more challenging. For the highest level students, you could have them do both. First, arrange the sentences and then put them in some sort of order to make a coherent conversation.

2. Have students work in pairs or small groups to correctly arrange the sentences, or words within the sentences.

Like this English Grammar Activity?

It’s from this book: 39 ESL Warm-Ups: For Teenagers and Adults. It’s the book for English teachers who want to save a ton of time when planning their ESL lessons.