Scaffolding Student Writing with Word Card Sentences

>>This activity is not input focused.<< The purpose of this activity is to help kids process the language they've been acquiring in class and create their own sentences and thoughts without having to come up with the words themselves. It helps build confidence before the first writing assessment.  I am always looking for new ways to scaffold student writing. This word card sentence activity was inspired by my talented and smart friend, Nissa Quill. Check out some pictures of the students working at the end of this post!

I also recorded this podcast episode to really explain the purpose of this activity and share more about how we discussed it in class.

Main Idea: Students are given cards with familiar words in the target language and work in groups to create as many sentences as possible with those words. They are given some blank cards to write their own words on as well. 

We did this activity after spending about 4-5 days on calendar talk in class.  Here are the words I gave students. To save myself work, I had them cut them out in their groups.

Here is what my lesson with this acitivty looked like:

1. Norming the class: Saying hi, checking in with students, taking attendance, and stating the objective (5 minutes)

2. Reading Workshop: We have been reading a novel together leading up to free choice reading (10 minutes)

3. Guided Oral Input: Calendar Talk (this is what we've been doing for our first 4 lessons of the year to build community and work on describing how to tell when something takes place) (15 minutes)

4. Word Card Sentence Activity (15 minutes)

Here are the steps I followed to have a successful activity in class: 

1. Prepare the word cards and print them.

2. Explain the directions to students. See my video of this here.

3. Split students into groups of 3-4 students.

4. Students find their groups and get a set of word cards.

5. Students work together to create as many sentences as possible (I made it a minimum of 5) using as many words as possible. As they created these sentences, they used their notebooks with the calendar and previous write and discuss sentences to help drive their sentence creation.

6. I gave students about 10-15 minutes to work. Feel free to adjust this as needed.

7. Students counted their number of sentences and words and then shared the sentence they were most proud of with the class.

If you have extra time, you could write a class text (write and discuss) with some of their sentences. Then you could have them translate the sentences into English by chorally reading them out loud or writing them down. 

I loved this activity because the students were getting a little extra input of already familiar words. They used higher order thinking to decide which words would be best used in each sentence and to come up with which words they needed to add to make a sentence make sense. They also worked together and had to use their communication skills. At the end, they felt proud that they were able to create 5+ sentences (some groups even had 18!!) in Spanish and it built their confidence creating sentences in the target language. BONUS! I got a break and my voice got a break while they worked!

Students work together to sort their cards and come up with sentences.

Some sentences that a group created with their word cards. It is OKAY if they aren't perfect.

Students working together to create sentences with their word cards.