Goal Ideas
- Given individual words from a sentence and a familiar visual, NAME will formulate a sentence to describe a picture in 3 out of 5 opportunities.
- Given individual words from a sentence, NAME will formulate a grammatically correct sentence 5-7 words in length in 75% of opportunities.
- NAME will formulate sentences containing past tense verbs to describe completed actions in pictures with 75% accuracy.
- NAME will formulate a sentence containing a given conjunction to describe a picture in 70% of opportunities.
- NAME will use an average sentence length of 4 or more words during a 5 minute conversation with a peer across 3 sessions.
Read more about my goals here.
Sentence & Question Formulation Resources
Here are my favorite resources that target sentence formulation:
Teaching Sentence Formulation Skills in Speech Therapy
One example of how we can make sentence building clear, direct, and more visual is by providing scaffolded supports that show sentence structure when working on sentence formulation.
You might provide a sentence frame or even visual boxes that show the function of each sentence part like these:
This might also include directly teaching parts of speech, even if you don’t name them directly. For example, you might say, “Sprinted is the action word in the sentence. It’s telling us what Mark did.”
Here’s another example of how I might introduce pronouns:
Below are some fun and easy activities I like to use when targeting sentence formulation:
- Sentence Unscrambles. Come up with silly sentences and write 1 word at a time on index cards or sticky notes. Have your students unscramble them to figure out the sentence.
- Sentence Builders. Give each student a word of a sentence and have them stand up and rearrange themselves to build the sentence.
- Mad Libs. I’ve found these at many stores (like Target, Walmart, or Dollar Stores) on a variety of fun topics including popular movies or TV shows.
- Using my digital Sentence Sliders! They’re perfect for direct teaching and providing tons of leveled practice opportunities.
Sentence Formulation Skills in Context
To increase the effectiveness and engagement of your therapy, I’d recommend targeting sentence formulation in context. That means doing sentence formulation activities as part of a bigger theme or unit.
My favorite way to do contextualized therapy is using picture books! Below are some easy ways to target sentence formulation with a picture book:
- Build sentences from given words to describe each picture scene from the story.
- Give each learner a page/scene from the story to formulate a sentence about. Then, put it all together to retell the story from the beginning to the end.
- Formulate sentences to answer questions about the story. For example, “Why did she travel to the planet?” is a great prompt to elicit a sentence using the word “because”.
Or, press the easy button and check out some of my contextualized, themed and story units below:
Shop Story Units Shop Themed Units
