The Purpose and Play of Sentence Scrambles

Here’s Why

Syntax refers to the specific arrangements of words, phrases, and clauses to form well-structured sentences, along with associated grammatical rules. Developing syntactic awareness enhances writers’ ability to translate their thoughts into carefully crafted written sentences (Berninger et al., 2011), and the way we structure our sentences affects how readers and listeners understand and interpret our ideas. Syntax can also signify one writer’s personal style and shape larger cultural expressions and identities. As students build their sentence construction skills, they gain the tools to vary sentence types, embed details thoughtfully, and express more sophisticated ideas.

In addition to its importance for written expression, there are also strong connections between syntax and reading comprehension. Syntactic awareness, the ability to monitor the relationships of words in a sentence, is crucial for overall reading comprehension (Graham and Perrin, 2010; Zhang et al., 2020). A reader’s ability to understand and engage with the ideas in a text is significantly impacted by the ways authors structure their sentences – their use of syntax.

The research and evidence that supports the importance of syntactical awareness is expansive, so it’s worth spending time developing a toolbox of strategies. Co-author Sarah Valter and I have a mini-series to share that will help fill that toolbox. Here are a few ideas and resources to use today.

Here’s How

While there are many ways to build syntactical awareness, sentence scrambles are playful and purposeful. While sentence scrambles are easy to explain, they have the potential to involve sophisticated cognitive work. Check out the following table for some examples, an answer (some of them have more than one correct answer!), and some potential conversations about the syntax.

Scrambled sentence	Possible answer	Thoughts about it
quiet shimmered mountain the above Bright lake stars.	Bright stars shimmered above the quiet mountain lake.	Mountain acts as an adjective Nouns and verbs serve as anchors
park floated lunchtime crowded colorful Several balloons during the across.	Several colorful balloons floated across the park during lunchtime.	Syntax involves looking for words that could go together It helps to think about where and when as we look for phrases
sleepy over quickly curious wall jumped brown The dogs sunrise at three.	The three curious brown dogs jumped over the wall at sunrise.	The order of adjectives in sentences What capital letters signify What happens when the order is changed
peacefully nearby retriever their the twins school energetic basketball practiced while exhausted After together golden slept.	After school, the energetic twins practiced basketball together while their golden retriever slept peacefully nearby.	The meanings and functions of various words The difference between conjunctions and prepositions (After can be both, but is a preposition in this sentence.) Where to place adverbs. (Peacefully could be in a few different places.)

TIPS:

• Differentiate by shortening or simplifying sentences. Compound and complex sentences are more challenging. Prepositional phrases also add difficulty.
• Invite variations in responses! Many of the scrambled sentences can be unscrambled in multiple ways. Use those variations to discuss punctuation, craft, and impact.
• Differentiate by including or excluding capital letters, end punctuation, or mid-sentence punctuation.
• Pay attention and use (or don’t use!) words that serve double or even triple purposes such as mountain which can be a noun or an adjective.
• Encourage students to write their own sentences, scramble them, and then share them. You can celebrate the variation in possible “sentence solutions.”
• Personalize your sentences. Children love to read sentences about themselves or about topics they find interesting.

If you like these, co-author Sarah Valter and I are working on building a bigger collection. Feel free to access them here. This document is open for editing, and we’d love you to contribute!

Closing Thoughts

Words are the combination of words can be a continuous source of curiosity and entertainment for students. The more you can point out simple and surprising combinations of words and word combinations, the more you’re likely to see interesting patterns show up in student writing.

Next week, Sarah will share a post that expands syntax work into studying sentences or short passages and creating ones with similar patterns.

Citations

Berninger VW, Nagy W, Beers S. Child writers’ construction and reconstruction of single sentences and construction of multi-sentence texts: contributions of syntax and transcription to translation. Read Writ. 2011 Feb 1;24(2):151-182. doi: 10.1007/s11145-010-9262-y. PMID: 21383865; PMCID: PMC3048336.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). “A Meta-Analysis of Writing Instruction for Adolescent Students Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 445–476.

Zhang, Z., Wu, Y., Zhou, J., Duan, S., Zhao, H. and Wang, R., (2020), April. SG-Net:Syntax-guided machine reading comprehension. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 34, No. 05, pp. 9636-9643).