Working on our oral communication

We have been working all year on getting away from the "Je vois..." sentences that my kids know and love. Today we played a "game" to ensure they started their sentences differently. 

I had one pile of my word wall sentence starters (here) and one of our spring word wall words (here). I picked the vocabulary words they already know from grade 1. I chose one student to pick a sentence starter (without looking), and one to pick our vocabulary word. They we *dramatically* flipped them over at the same time and put them into a pocket chart. 

In groups of 2-3, they then came up with sentences (orally) that started with the sentence prompt and contained the vocabulary word. My students got really into it! I also loved the results, because they automatically had to step up their game with their sentence structures. 

This was drastically different to the "Je vois (#) (colour) (object)" sentences that they are used to creating. 

Here are some of the really cool sentences they came up with: 

Pourquoi est-ce que les oiseaux sont nés dans les œufs?
Quand je vois l'herbe vert, c'est le printemps. 
Dans mon sac a dos, il y a une abeille. L'abeille m'a piqué. 
Est-ce que tu as un bain d'oiseau à ta maison?

SO fun! Although they didn't understand what I was so excited about, they seemed to have also had fun :)