Making Mine Long

Students expand simple sentences by collaboratively adding words and phrases, competing to create the most interesting extended sentence.

Procedure

1. Demonstrate with the whole class. Write a simple sentence on the board (e.g. "The cat likes milk"). Ask students to contribute words or phrases of up to three words to make it more interesting, one addition at a time. Insert contributions into the sentence. You might end up with: "The big, gray, clever cat that belongs to my wonderful eighty-two-year-old grandmother really and truly likes only chocolate flavoured, slightly heated, evaporated milk in the afternoon."
2. Divide the class into small groups. Give each group a different simple sentence to expand.
3. Each group reads out its base sentence and expanded version to the class.
4. A secretary from each group writes the group sentence on the board.
5. The class votes for the most original sentence (students cannot vote for their own group).

Tips

• Beginner sentences: "They love to eat," "My brother cooks," "Pizza is good"
• Intermediate/advanced sentences: "The man was grateful," "Father never understood," "They met"
• Easiest done digitally — type on screen and insert additions in real time
• Variation: at any point, students can insert full stops and split the text into multiple sentences
• Can use base sentences from the coursebook to reinforce recently taught grammar or vocabulary