Sentence Scrambles

Okay, I admit it.  I am a bit of a grammar nerd.  (I can blame both my mother and my tenth grade English teacher for that.  Thank you, Mr. Russell.)  So, while I love teaching my first and second graders, listening to poor grammar while they speak and reading their writing with below-grade level grammar really gets to me.  The best way to help our students improve their grammar is by having them read A LOT and by using correct grammar around them.  However, what do you do when this is not enough?  I teach in a very rural area.  As are most rural areas, it is a relatively high poverty area as well.  People have their own grammatical dialect.  This is the grammar that my students have heard since birth, and just using grammar correctly myself will not teach conventional English well enough.  While I do not look down on this dialect, it is important that our students understand and are able to use conventional English, as this is what is used in academia and most of the workforce.  We have all seen the Facebook postings of poor grammar on job applications that make you assume the person never got the job.
One area in which my students really struggle in their writing is with sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation.  We spend far more time on this than I would like, but, unfortunately, I occasionally still get second graders who can't seem to remember to start a sentence with a capital letter and end it with a punctuation mark.  I have tried  many different things.  My school uses Shurley English as our main grammar curriculum.  (It also included writing, which I do not use.  I use a writing workshop model instead.)  Its main focus in the early grades is capitalization, punctuation, and parts of speech.  It is very repetitive (which can be good), but it is not at all kinesthetic and uses the same strategy all of the time.  I find that I need to supplement it to help students understand the concepts.
One activity I use in my classroom are sentence scrambles.  Each student gets a word (or punctuation mark) in the sentence.  They need to work together to put themselves in the correct order to make the sentence.  This activity is fun, cooperatiive, and helps students see sentence order better.  It is easy to pick out the first word in the sentence because it begins with a capital letter.  However, as they do the activity, I hear them say over and over again, "That word is first.  It starts with a capital."  This helps them form the connection in their brain that sentences begin with capitals.
I have created 10 scrambled sentences that are easy enough for my first graders to read.  The sentences are of various complexities, and include sentences with subjects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, and simple prepositional phrases.  I color-coded the parts of speech in each sentence so that I can also use them to discuss parts of speech with my students.
If you would like a copy of this activity for yourself, you can get it by clicking on the picture below:

What do you do in your classroom to help students understand sentence structure?  Let me know in the comments section!