The Diminishing Sentence

The Diminishing Sentence

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Have your students add one word at a time to some basic sentence you write on the board, making the sentence as long as possible.

See an example below:

 

The fat and ugly sisters who tried to stop beautiful young Cinderella from meeting the rich and handsome Prince Charming who lived in the great golden palace were very unhappy when she married him and they lived happily ever after.

 

Then you erase one word at a time (I prefer to delete the words randomly, not in the order they come in the sentence), and have students read out the full sentence to you. It will first seem easy to them, but wait until there are only a couple words left on the board!

This is great practice for both their memory and pronunciation.

 

(next class you could start with the one word that remained at the end of the previous class and try to reconstruct the whole paragraph. The students will have already worked so hard on the paragraph that this should be relatively easy.)