5 Fun and Educational Sentence Building Games for Kids

Looking for fun ways to teach sentence structure and educational ways to improve your child's sentence building skills? You're in the right place! Playing sentence building games with your child will both captivate their attention and inspire fun ways to teach sentence structure.

Why sentence building games are important 

Sentence building games are not only fun to play but also play a critical role in the language development of children. They differ from many of the traditional ways kids are taught sentence structure and provide an interactive way to make sentence building enjoyable and fun. Here are a few reasons why playing a sentence making game or two is beneficial: 

• Builds communication skills by providing opportunities for children to practice constructing sentences. It can also help them better express themselves and build confidence in their ability to communicate effectively. 
• Boosts vocabulary by exposing children to new words. Playing various types of sentences games allows learners to understand the meaning and usage of different words.
• Develops critical thinking skills by asking children to think strategically and creatively to analyze letters and words, sentence structures, and more. 
• Encourages teamwork and social skills because many sentence building games require players to work cooperatively together to complete the game.  

Benefits of playing sentence building games

Not only is gameplay fun, but it comes with numerous benefits for your child's overall development. Let's explore why we recommend playing sentence building games with kids: 

• Builds confidence in language skills when children successfully construct sentences and play games that expand their vocabulary skills.
• Increases interest in learning because games provide an element of fun, which motivates them to want to play (learn) more! 
• Provides a safe environment to make mistakes  and allows them to learn from errors and refine their language and sentence building skills while having fun. 

Top 5 sentence building games 

From a funny fill in the blank sentences game to an imaginative storyline sentence making game, these various types of sentences games cater to a mix of abilities, ages, and learning styles. Get ready to watch your child's language skills soar as they have a blast playing these unique and fun sentence building games! 

Clover Leap

2-4 players • 5 & up

Skills Focus: Sentence Structure, Vocabulary

Clover Leap is a silly sentence making game that gives young learners a step up in reading and vocabulary. It's a unique sentence building game that introduces parts of speech: pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and nouns while teaching basic sentence structure. Players guide a pair of sheep around the field of colored clover tiles trying to collect enough words to build complete sentences. The game comes with 56 clover tiles that contain fully interchangeable parts of sentences and are even color-coded to help children sequence them correctly!

Pickles' Pig Tales

2-5 players • 6 & up

Skills Focus: Story Telling, Communication

Building storytelling skills has never been so fun. Tell the story from the beginning during each turn, then add one new sentence to it based on the object shown on the card drawn. Receive the card when you tell the story correctly from the beginning. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins! This is one of those hilarious finish the sentence games that will have kids smiling and giggling as they learn!

Linkity

3-8 players • 8 & up

Skills Focus: Vocabulary, Focus, Word Association

This fun and fast-paced fill in the blank sentences game lets everyone play at the same time to try and make quick connections between words. Linkity is great for expanding vocabulary as players think of words that start with the letter on their card. The rest of the players then try to play their cards by calling out another word associated with the previous word. It's a laugh-out-loud sentence making game that builds vocabulary and encourages word association.  

3-5 players • 8 & up

Skills Focus: Communication, Sequencing, Planning

Let's go to Hollywood to play The Reel Script, where you’ll create your own screenplay by bidding on “lines” for a movie, forming them into scripts, and then pitching them to other players in hopes of being voted the best! Between 270 script lines, 100 bidding tokens, 5 colorful movie reels, and much more, players will develop imaginative storylines across 6 different categories like adventure, drama, and action. Building the storyline allows players to access their creative spirit while bidding for story elements draws on critical thinking and probability assessment skills. The Reel Script is more than just a sentence building game, it's a noteworthy nod to incredible writing and behind-the-scenes (literally!) work that goes into creating an entertaining and compelling movie script. 

Word Bits

2-4 players • 8 & up

Skills Focus: Spelling, Quick Thinking, Vocabulary

Utilizing vocabulary and spelling at any age helps keep reading and language skills fresh, and Word Bits does just that! Quick-thinking word matches, story-building and telling, and vocabulary challenges are just some of the benefits of playing this word game. There are plenty of ways to prompt additional skill development in this game. To facilitate comparison and support vocabulary review, educators may choose to use a limited set of cards, prepare a list of potential words that relate to the cards, and encourage children to move letters around to trigger ideas of words comprised of those letters. Children can experiment with a dictionary to recall or discover new words that work with the letter sequences and use their memory skills to compare letters that they have to their memory of letter sequences in words.

Game on!

Sentence building games are a powerful tool for enhancing your child's language development. By incorporating these games into their traditional learning routine, you can make sentence building enjoyable and effective, while simultaneously boosting their grammar knowledge, expanding their vocabulary, improving their reading comprehension, and much more! 

From preschoolers to elementary-age children and beyond, there are games suitable for every age and stage. Check out all of SimplyFun's Reading & Language Arts games and start to build and foster a love for language! 

 

This blog was originally published on September 19, 2023. It was updated on July 29, 2024.