From Simple to Stronger Sentences: A Fun Way to Teach Conjunctions

Written by Heather Down 10 February 2025

Currently, I am working with a lovely family over Zoom in a home-school option for tutoring services for their son. This week, we had a great discussion about sentence writing and how Mum and Dad can support at home with this. Spelling and writing are challenging for this student, and he tends to use the same sentence ending with all of his writing: “It was fun.” The main reason he will be using this is because he knows how to spell all the words, and he knows that at the end of most sentences, this will (hopefully) make sense. If he is asked to expand his sentence, this is the go-to as it’s safe.

We, however, want to start building his confidence with writing, and our goal is to have him expand his sentences with other sentence endings. One way to do this is to use conjunctions, or joining words, to join two sentences. The common ones I generally teach are and, but, because, and so. To ease the cognitive load, our plan is to first introduce these orally. I remember reading a great article by Natalie Wexler (which of course I can’t find) about how incorporating the language we expect our students to use in writing orally can support them in turn with their writing.

So how will we do this? We want to ensure that this student does not always feel like they are doing ‘school work,’ so I thought about how we could gamify a lesson and, at the same time, include all the family to learn about conjunctions, a good choice of sentence ending, and expand vocabulary.

The idea of using a large homemade 6-sided dice came to mind. I have seen similar things to this in the past, so I popped this together for my student and his family. On one dice, each of the six sides is written either and, but, because, or so. There is a second dice, which is blank, and this will have sentence starters on it. The idea is to roll the sentence starter dice, then the conjunction dice, and create a sentence that must be finished. For example:

• Pasta is my favourite meal but __________________
• Pasta is my favourite meal and __________________
• I love my dog because __________________
• I love my dog so _______________

It’s important to remember that each conjunction has a specific purpose:

• But indicates a change of direction.
• Because tells us why something happens.
• And connects two sentences together.
• So indicates a result.

Practising this orally first allows students to build confidence without the pressure of writing. They can experiment with different sentence endings, playfully explore ideas, and develop an understanding of how conjunctions change meaning. Once they are comfortable speaking their sentences, we can move toward writing them down. This approach helps ease the frustration that often comes with struggling to write and allows students to focus on forming ideas first. The suggestion was to include all the family, perhaps a fun game to play during or after dinner to encourage conversation and as a way to think about the day.

To make it easy for you to try this with your own learners, I’ve created a free downloadable version of the dice, which you can grab from my website! Give it a go and see how much fun your students have while strengthening their writing skills.