Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

The Australian Curriculum sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life. Skills in the Foundation Year curriculum include:

• using simple sentences.

It’s easy to help your child practise this skill as part of everyday life – just use these simple ideas.

Play with sentences

Sentence-building games can be great fun, while helping your child develop their skills. Here’s a version for two people:

• choose a starting sentence – eg something your child said; a sentence you just read; or something simple such as Yesterday I went to the park
• ask your child to think of a new word or phrase – eg ice cream
• find a way to add that word to the sentence – eg Yesterday I went to the park and ate an ice cream.
• now swap: you think of a new word (eg slide), and challenge your child to add it to the sentence (Yesterday I went to the park, played on the slide and ate an ice cream.)

Sentences have to make sense, but they don't have to be sensible. For example, Yesterday I went to the park and played on the ice cream slide makes perfect sense, even though it's silly (and hilarious)!

Keep taking turns until you can’t add any new words, or the sentence gets too long to remember. The longer you make the sentences, the more challenging it becomes (and the more your child develops their memory skills).

Go online

For online reinforcement, Prehistoric sentence builder and Ocean sentence builder will give your child practice at:

• creating sentences.

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