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Teaching Connectives: 5 Activities and worksheets for the classroom.

Connectives
Connectives are what sow our words together creating structure to our language. It is essential for students to incorporate connectives into their language as they grow in order to develop their language and creativity skills. Connectives are part of the UK national curriculum.

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Connectives: National Curriculum.

Connectives represents the logical connection between two sentences, and they are crucial for understanding basic meaning of English. 

Children in KS2 are expected to use them in sentences or paragraphs, and by Year 6 children will need to have good sense of them, why and how to use them, and be prepared for the KS2 Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test.

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Emile's Learning Objectives:

  1. To be able to connect simple sentences with connectives.
  2. To understand why we use connectives.
  3. To be able to identify connectives. 
  4. To use connectives in day to day life, developing language skills further. 
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What is a connective?

A connective is a word or a short phrase that combines one part of a text to another, There are many types of connectives such as conjunctions, prepositions and adverbs. Although connective is the umbrella term for all the listed terms above, students are still encouraged to identify them with their unique grammatical names according to the new primary curriculum.

There are 8 types of connectives in the English language

  1. Adding: and, also, as well as, moreover, furthermore, besides, in addition.
  2. Cause and Effect: because, so, therefore, thus, consequently, as a result of.
  3. Comparing: equally, in the same way, like, similarly, likewise, as with, as compared with.
  4. Contrasting: whereas, instead of, alternatively, otherwise, unlike, on the other hand, in contrast.
  5. Emphasizing: above all, in particular, especially, significantly, indeed, notably, most of all.
  6. Illustrating: for example, such as, for instance, as revealed by, in the case of, as shown by.
  7. Qualifying: however, although, unless, except, if, as long as, apart from, yet, despite.
  8. Sequencing: next, then, first, second, finally, meanwhile, after.
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Five fun activities for teaching connectives:

When it comes to teaching, as you may be aware, here at Emile we believe that game-based learning is one of the many techniques that have a positive reinforcement in a young student’s education. Therefore, we believe that you can successfully approach connectives with a fun games such as the following….

  1. Student List: You can ask children to write down all the words that they think are connectives. Circle the correct ones, and explain the wrong ones. This way they can build up their own collection of words, and it will reinforce their understanding.
  2. Connective List: Let children choose one from a list and come up with a sentence that uses the word. It can be a really fun activity. Try to encourage pupils to make the sentence as funny as possible or possibly build a story, one sentence at a time around the classroom.
  3. Connective Challenge: Encourage your students to include as many connectives in their speech as they can (it must make sense!), you can split the class into four groups and whoever does a better job win!
  4. Connective learning software and resources:  Try using some grammar-learning software. Apps like Grammar with Emile can easily get the attention of the most active student in class and make them love practising and competing at what they have learned. It offers the opportunity for pupils to practice with hundreds of questions with instant feedback, and no marking pressure for the teacher to worry about.
  5. Finding Connective Waldo: Find a piece of text from your class book, local newspapers, magazines, or an online article, and ask your pupils to circle as many connectives as they can. Review the results all together as a class and ask them to re-create some different sentences using the circled words.
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Three connective worksheets:

Finding connective Waldo.

Get pupils into two teams, and each team takes a set of four sentences about food. Make some connectives cards and place them upside down. Teams take turns to pick a connective card and try to place it where it connects the two parts of the sentence. Make sure that both teams agree that the sentence make good sense.

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Connective Paragraphs.

Much like the previous worksheet, however this time we are working with paragraphs. 

You can also split into teams or work individually, but the paragraphs must make sense!

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Spot the connective.

Get students to individually look at their worksheet and figure out where in the sentence there is a connective. This will exercise their investigation skills which will help in current and later learning. 

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