Adverb placement

In this activity, students explore the possibility of placing adverbs in various places within a sentence.

Goals

• Practise constructing sentences with adverbs.
• Identify a key trait of adverbs - that they can often be placed at various points in a sentence.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will be building sentences with adverbs.

In the Activity in the right menu, each slides presents a set of words that should be arranged into a sentence. Most of the words in each slide are blue, but one is red. The red word is different - it can be placed in more than one position, still allowing for a complete sentence. The red word is an adverb. Students at KS1 are required to know the term adverb.

Ask the students to arrange the words into a complete sentence, and then to try moving the red word (the adverb) to create other possible sentences. Possibilities for the first slide include:

• The girl ran quickly.
• Quickly, the girl ran.
• The girl quickly ran.

Ask students the following questions:

• Does the meaning change as the adverb moves? If so, is it difficult or easy to describe the meaning change? Some students may intuit different interpretations when the adverb is moved.
• Are there any places the adverb can't be placed? For example, The quickly girl ran? What patterns do they notice in terms of where the adverb can be placed?