I teach, and I built Sentle. It started as a warm-up I wanted for my own classes, and it grew into a daily puzzle anyone can play. If it is useful to you, please take it. It is free, and it will stay free.
Each day Sentle takes one real sentence from a work of literature, breaks it into phrases, and shuffles them. Students put it back in the order the author wrote it.
Running it as a starter
Put it on the board and let the class argue it out. Five minutes, no preparation, nothing to print. The argument tends to be the lesson: students have to justify an order out loud, and the sentence itself settles it.
A few questions that usually open it up:
- Which phrase has to come first, and how can you tell before you try it?
- What is the semicolon doing? What would change if it were a full stop?
- Why this order rather than the other one that also seems to work?
It works just as well on student devices. Everyone gets the same sentence on the same day, so whatever you do with it afterwards is a shared conversation.
When more than one order works
This comes up often, and it is worth expecting. A subordinate clause will usually sit quite happily at the front of a sentence or at the end, and both versions are perfectly good English. When the rain stopped, we walked home and we walked home when the rain stopped are both correct.
Sentle only accepts the author's order, which sounds like a limitation and turns out to be the useful part. When a student has a version that is grammatical and still not the one Dickens wrote, you have a real reason to ask what his choice does that theirs does not. Usually the answer is about emphasis and rhythm, and about which idea the reader is left holding at the end of the line. That question is much easier to ask when the student has just built the alternative themselves.
Find a sentence from a text you teach
You are not stuck with today's puzzle. Every sentence Sentle has ever used is listed below, by author and title. Type to narrow it down, then click a number to open that puzzle.
Each of those links is a normal web address, so you can paste one into Google Classroom, a slide, or a worksheet and know exactly which sentence your students will get.
What it practises
Reordering a sentence turns out to be close reading with the safety off. To get it right, a student has to read the clause structure, follow the punctuation, track what the pronouns point back to, and hear the parallelism. It is difficult to guess your way through, which is rather the point.
After each solve, a short note names the thing that made that particular sentence work: a semicolon balancing two matched clauses, an inversion, a dependent clause held back until the end. The hope is that the next sentence is a little easier to see.
If you use it
I would genuinely like to hear how it goes, what year levels it suits, and what would make it more useful to you. If there is a text you teach and would like sentences from, just say. I can usually add it.
Write to me at .