Hi Neha,
A quick internet search will turn up tons of options for scrambled sentence worksheet bundles. I’ll cut to the chase and let you know that, while the strategy has promise when planned intentionally, I’m not universally endorsing the practice.
The reason for the skepticism I share with you is that I’ve seen sentence scrambling (sometimes called sentence anagrams) used both successfully and in problematic ways. When used successfully, the teacher presents students with an appropriately complex sentence that has been decomposed into words, phrases, or a combination of the two. The sentence is purposefully selected to connect to grammar skills and the topic of study, usually by picking a sentence from a text that students either have read or are preparing to read. Then, the teacher supports students through questioning and discussion to unscramble or reorganize the words/phrases into a complete sentence. It works best when reconstruction includes hands-on manipulation of the sentences.
When teachers use the activity as described above, it has great potential to teach students complex and abstract concepts while exposing students to sophisticated sentence structures in an engaging way. This is a good reason to use it! Reconstructing a sentence allows students to notice how words, phrases, and clauses work together to convey meaning, which will support students in reading and writing complex sentences. Examining how an author has constructed a sentence gives students a model for how they might arrange and connect ideas in their own writing.
With a group of younger students just learning about complete simple sentences, I might break the following sentence up into two parts to reorder:
absorb water. // Tree roots
This decomposition into a noun phrase (tree roots) and a verb phrase (absorb water) would let me reinforce that a sentence has a “who/what” and a “do/action.” However, because the activity is versatile, that’s not the only way I could present the sentence to students. I could also decompose the sentence into four parts:
roots // absorb water // . // Tree
The decomposition would allow me to reinforce end-sentence punctuation rules I’ve taught because the period at the end of the sentence is one of the parts for students to rearrange. The capital letter in Tree is a clue that it’s the first word in the sentence. Knowing this convention helps students unscramble the sentence but also reinforces sentence capitalization rules. However, I could also make the <t> in tree lowercase and expect students to capitalize it after they have unscrambled the sentence.
The same activity can be used with older students. Perhaps I’m teaching students about complex sentences that contain a dependent clause and an independent clause. In this situation, I could present students with the following:
their movement // tectonic plates // , // can cause // slowly // earthquakes // .// move // although
In addition to thinking through word order, this sentence supports sentence-level comprehension because it requires students to think critically about what makes sense. Consider the following:
- Although tectonic plates move slowly, their movement can cause earthquakes.
- Although earthquakes move slowly, their movement can cause tectonic plates.
Both earthquakes and tectonic plates are noun phrases, so technically both of the sentences are grammatically correct, but only the second sentence is accurate because it shows the causal relationship between tectonic plates and earthquakes correctly.
The words to unscramble are just one part of instruction. How you facilitate the activity and direct students’ attention makes up the bulk of the instruction. Depending on the needs of the class, in the above example you might choose to have students work together to make a complete sentence with no further direction and then discuss at the end where the comma belongs (after the dependent clause). However, I could also structure the activity by first letting students know that the sentence I want them to build will contain a dependent clause + independent clause.
In that case, I might start the activity by asking, “Which word could introduce an idea as a dependent clause? (Although.) What does although tell us about the relationship between two ideas? (It tells us that the second idea is somewhat surprising given the first idea.)” Now, I’ve supported students to start their sentence with the word although and prepared the class for a discussion on how the dependent and independent clauses relate to each other. From here, I could extend the activity by having students write their own dependent clause + independent clause sentence starting with although. For more ideas on high-leverage sentence-level practices, you may be interested in AIM’s free white paper on sentence writing.
Contrast the ideas I’ve shared with an activity packet students are given as seatwork, and the expectation is for them to rearrange words into random sentences. You can see how the intent of the activity is lost. The purpose is not just to reorder words in the right order. The recommendation is worthwhile when the activity is used with deliberately selected sentences and teacher guidance so that the activity provides instruction on syntax (how the word functions in a sentence) and builds sentence-level comprehension. Its usefulness depends on what students already understand about words, parts of speech, phrases, clauses, and sentence structures, and what you, as the teacher, intentionally ask them to notice.
I hope this gives you a reason to give the scrambled sentence a second look!
