Ideas for Targeting Conjunctions in Literacy-Based Therapy

After working on activities that focus on vocabulary and semantic skills, the next step in the literacy-based therapy framework is to target syntactic and grammatical skills.

One syntactic skill you may want to target is use of conjunctions to formulate compound and/or complex sentences.

A conjunction is a word that connects parts of a sentence together (read more in this post).

There are several kinds of conjunctions:

• Coordinating conjunctions

• Subordinating conjunctions

• Correlative conjunctions

• Conjunctive adverbs

🌟 Here are 9 fun ideas for working on creating compound and complex sentences using conjunctions!

1️⃣ Identify examples of sentences containing conjunctions in the book with students.

2️⃣ Write a handful of conjunctions on a sticky note and places them on the floor all around the room. Alternatively, create squares on the floor with painters tape or outside with chalk.

Provide students with a sentence about the story. Students can identify the conjunction in the sentence by moving to stand on the sticky note or in the square.

3️⃣ Fill in the blank. Take a look at the example below 👇🏽

4️⃣ Provide students with two sentences and ask them to combine them into one amazing sentence. Provide students with a bank of conjunctions to choose from or a target conjunction. Students can create sentences orally and/or write them down.

5️⃣ Complete the sentence. Ask a question that would prompt the student to create a sentence about the story with the target conjunctions. Provide a sentence starter.

SLP: What happened when the tortoise shared his house with the rabbit? The tortoise shared his house with the rabbit but…(sentence starter)

Student: The tortoise shared his house with the rabbit but it cracked.

Continue with similar question types and sentence starters (as needed) to elicit the target sentence structure. See the example below using the story Too Many Carrots 👇🏽

6️⃣ Insert the missing conjunction. Choose a target conjunction and tell students the given sentence is missing the target conjunction. Here are some examples:

7️⃣ Scavenger Hunt. Write a few target conjunctions on sticky notes or scrap paper. Hide them around the room and let students search for them. Then work on making sentences about the story and pictures using the conjunction they found.

8️⃣ Write each clause and a bank of conjunctions on strips of paper that the student can manipulate to formulate compound or complex sentences. (see example below)

9️⃣ Provide students with the subject or verb and target conjunction. Have them generate a sentence about a picture/event in the story using the given elements. (see example below from The Great Garden Escape)

Hope this has been helpful! 😊