Our Scrambled Sentences activity is based on the picture book The Peasant Prince by Li Cunxin. It allows students to demonstrate their understanding of how sentences are structured. The science of reading has proven that teaching syntax concepts, such as sentence structure, helps improve students’ reading and writing.

Students will require some prior knowledge of sentence structure to complete this task, as they must order the jumbled parts of the sentence before using them to construct sentences based on the characters, settings and events in the story. Students are encouraged to enhance their sentences by adding describing words, such as adjectives and adverbs.

We recommend challenging your confident writers to compose various sentences, including complex ones.

To cater for the various needs of students in your class, we have included two versions of this resource. Version 1 includes sentences with a subject and verb only, while Version 2 includes sentences with a subject, verb and an object.