First Language (Dinka) Literacy as a Foundation for English ...

Section 2: Teaching Ideas
Sentence makers for ‘writing’
A weather text on the ‘sentence maker’
The class used large fuzzy boards with word cards on Velcro to revise and create texts.
The fuzzy boards and word cards came from an approach popular in primary schools in
the 1970s (the Breakthrough to Literacy method of Mackay, Thomson and Schaub). The
boards and cards are known as ‘sentence makers’.
At the start of the course, the class used the sentence makers to create texts about the
weather. The whole class talked about the weather first and established the ‘facts’, then
individuals volunteered to create a text eg last night was hot or today is good. This was a
hands on introduction to the significance of word order (learners placed word cards on the
board, then tested out the sentence by reading it out - quickly discovering that different
word order affected meaning). The whole class was involved in the construction and
editing processes.
Once the group was very familiar with the topic, they also created weather texts in pairs
using individual sentence makers (words written on business cards). This allowed people
to work at different levels, with some pairs sticking to a single sentence, while others
created more extended texts.
© Commonwealth of Australia 2009 Dinka-English Literacy Project Page 23