3rd Grade Silly Sentences

Artwork by Amber

("The rich horse jumped over the hairy carrot.")

This quick lesson is a great way to have some drawing fun while reinforcing parts of speech and sentence construction.  It's also especially appropriate given this year's school-wide writing focus.  

After reviewing the definitions of various parts of speech, students randomly select two adjectives, two nouns, and a verb phrase from three different bags.  I have the three parts of speech on strips of paper in three different colors for help in constructing the sentences.  (If students are not as sure about which part of speech is which, they can still put them in the right color order to construct a proper sentence.  Either way, the order for our silly sentences is "adjective-noun-verb phrase-adjective-noun."  The different colors also help make clean-up go much faster.  Usually students are able to construct at least two sentences and create drawings to illustrate them in one 45-minute period. 

Students quickly see that the random selection of their parts of speech makes for some funny sentences.  For example, the student who created the drawing above picked "rich" and "hairy" for her adjectives, "jumped over" as her verb phrase, and "horse" and "carrot" as her nouns.  From these, she constructed the following sentence to draw: "The rich horse jumped over the hairy carrot."  Of course, the challenge is in how to draw a horse that looks rich or a hairy carrot.  The students always get very creative finding solutions to these drawing challenges!   

Artwork by Lily

("The big-eared scuba diver swam with the skinny snake.")

Artwork by Cameron

("The romantic book broke up with the gigantic dragon.")