Types of Sentences with Taco Bell Sauce Packets!

Hi everyone!

Thanks to Veteran's Day off, I have a few minutes to update my blog! I've been meaning to write this post for the past two weeks, but you know how it goes - I don't know how any of us teachers really balance it all!

Over the last few weeks, we have been focusing on the four sentence types - Declarative (statement), Interrogative (question), Exclamatory (exclamation), and Imperative (command).

I had gone over the sentence types with various introduction activities and whole group practice in identifying the sentences, when one night I was getting ready to eat my weekly dose - (don't judge) - of a Taco Bell Mexican Pizza, and I brought out my (hoarders' anonymous) plastic bag of Taco Bell sauce packets from my cabinet. Reading the sayings on the packets, I remembered an idea I had read about a couple years ago. The sayings on the sauce packets were used to practice sentence types! I quickly counted up my sauce treasure trove - and realized I had 60 packets. Again, don't judge. Then I separated them in the four types of sentences, counted them, and realized I had enough to create groups of 3-5 students and give them a bunch of packets so they could sort them themselves. 

So as I bit into my Mexican Pizza, I also started creating a sorting mat for the sauce packets and a recording sheet for the sentences!

The next day, I broke the students up into groups. What is awesome about the sauce packets is that many of them don't have punctuation marks. This is perfect because students have to sort the packets into the four types of sentences, BUT FIRST, they have to figure out what KIND of sentence it is if it doesn't have a punctuation mark. 

After the group put the packets onto the correct category on the sorting mat, they all had to write those sentences under the correct heading on the second recording sheet, and had to make sure to put the correct punctuation at the end as well. 

You can bet your fire sauce that this was a high interest activity, coupled with the group discussion, which made it very successful in identifying the four types of sentences. 

The following week, I had them create this super easy and colorful flip booklet. My 2nd grade teammate thought up the colorful part! You take two pieces of white paper, layer them, fold them over once, and you get a flipbook with four parts. Students wrote the title on the top page, but this page is also used to write the declarative sentence underneath the title. They used colored paper strips to write the names of the sentence types, and then wrote a sentence and illustrated each kind on the correct flap. 

I hope you read this all the way through because now if you have, you get to grab the Taco Bell sauce packet freebie! I had to take out the graphic of the packets on the top corner because I stole  borrowed that picture from the good ol' Internet to put for my class, but I guess it would be illegal to share it.. ;) So you get the two pages without the pic, but that's okay!

Click HERE. Enjoy!