Baffle Gab (TM) is a fun way to work on sentence construction.

The game is advertised for 2+ players ages 7 and up. The set comes with 300  verb, noun, and adjective cards which are worth 1 or 2 points. It also includes four little Baffle Gab pads, pencils, “Bone Bucks” and a 1 minute timer. The object of the game is to use 5 words correctly in a sentence or two before the time is up.

As advertised, the players are writing a story, but in my experience time allows for people to write only a sentence.  The supports built into the game are (1) the definitions on the back of the cards, and (2) the leeway to add suffixes to turn verbs or adjectives into different parts of speech. The game makers suggest you earn bonus bucks for every point in your sentence and that the game ends at 100 bone bucks. The modern educational setting certainly doesn’t allow for a Monopoly-length game, so we just play a few rounds and see who winds up with the most points.

Scoring is straightforward with 1 or 2 points earned for each word used, as indicated by the word card. (For example, scuttle, excavate, and ruthless are 2 point words; drool, ooze, and famous are 1 pointers.) A player who uses all 5 words correctly gets to double their points. Any player is allowed to challenge another player’s use of a word. If the word is deemed to be either syntactically or semantically incorrect, the player gets no points for that one word in the sentence.

Examples above:

The deer pranced and tickled the bear. = 2 points

The itchy pimple pranced on my skin aimlessly. = 2 points

I popped a pimple and it tickled. = 2 points

VARIATIONS:

You can make your own customized game cards with class vocabulary words. On the Vocabulary A-Z website, you can create definition and example cards for a 12 word list.