Teaching sentence types
by Lynne Hand
Instructions to the English teacher
There are different kinds of sentences and getting your students to identify sentences according to their purpose can be a fun way of teaching sentence structure. Prepare a selection of short sentences and ask your students to classify them according to their purpose:-
Declarative
A declarative sentence makes a statement and ends with a full stop.
Imperative
An imperative sentence gives a command or makes a
request. Most imperative sentences end with a full stop. A
strong command ends with an exclamation point (!).
Interrogative
An interrogative sentence asks a question and ends with a question mark.
Exclamatory
An exclamatory sentence shows excitement or expresses strong feeling and ends with an exclamation point.
For example:-
Close the door please.
Is it true?
Take your hands off me!
Help!
Mr Bean teaches English.
You can expand the lesson by leaving out the punctuation for the students to fill in.
If you need some more sentence examples check out my quiz 'Types of sentences'.
Do you have an article, handout or a teaching idea/tip that you would like to share?