Big Box of Sentence Building

All right, you lovers of hands-on activities! Here's a good one for you! This game is subtitled "A Creative Way to Build an Endless Number of Sentences Using 250 Puzzle Pieces." Each laminated puzzle piece has a word or punctuation or empty blank. The pieces are color-coded into groups: punctuation, verbs, nouns, articles, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and personal pronouns. You can choose from a variety of games designed to build knowledge of parts of speech, sentence construction, vocabulary, and punctuation. In one game, you'll build sentences with a blank space for a noun, and the children will find a noun to put into the sentence. In another game, children take turns building sentences one piece at a time. Of course, if you're working with only one child, you can be the other player. In another game, children have to unscramble the puzzle pieces. In another game, players spin a spinner to accumulate pieces until they have enough to build a sentence. There are two other games, and you can even make up your own. As a former English teacher/tutor, I can tell you that with any game like this, you'll encounter words that can appear in more than one part of speech; be on guard against potential confusion. Other than that caveat, I only see two other tiny flaws. The writer of the instructions completely forgot to list the pink-coded personal pronouns in the list of categories, and the cyan blue of the adverbs looks too close to the blue of the verbs. But those are all minor points. Now, you're ready to have loads of fun building sentences and learning grammar. ~ Caryl