Sentence reduction

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Disappearing Sentence

Printable version of Disappearing sentence and other worksheets

Jane went out early and walked sleepily down the street to buy some milk and bread when she saw her old friend driving very fast in a beautiful new red car; she waved quickly just before the car disappeared around the sharp corner.

Objective
To increase awareness of correct sentence structure.

What do I do?
1 Write the sentence on the board.

2 Divide students in to two or more teams. Explain that they must remove words from the sentence to make a shorter, but still grammatically correct sentence.

3 Teams take it in turns to remove words, according to the rules below, until the sentence has disappeared.

4 Erase the words as the teams choose them, making the sentence shorter and shorter. The team who removes the last word(s) is the winner.

RULES
You can remove one, two, or three consecutive words.
The sentence must still be gramatically correct after you have removed the word(s).
(optional rule) You can add or remove punctuation when you remove words.

Printable version of Disappearing sentence and other worksheets