The Sentence Train: Student Edition

The Sentence Train is an engaging, individualised, fun, and jargon-free way to build sentence mastery—in the classroom or at home.  

The Sentence Train™ concept was developed by Dr Ian Hunter as a rapid means to teach sentence construction to younger children and those struggling with English composition. Typically, a teacher will commence teaching using simple sentences, move to compound sentences, leading to complex sentences. Word classes, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, are taught, and then clausal constructions and modifiers added as a way to develop the sentence. All these techniques are rooted in structural or functional grammar. Such an approach is not without shortcomings. Because of this, The Sentence Train™ method makes sentence teaching easier and more rapid. The method breaks sentences into units of meaning, or chunks.

The Sentence Train™ Student Pack is recommended for ages 5-12 and contains smaller train pieces, specially designed to allow group work. The train pieces—in four colourways—easily fit on a desk or workspace. Students can model different sentence styles themselves, and then discuss in groups, or present on magnetic whiteboards.

The Student Pack contains:

• 8 locomotives and 32 carriages in four different colours: green, blue, orange, yellow.
• The Sentence Train Full-Colour Classroom Instruction Manual
• 46 punctuation marks (assorted)

The pack has been designed like this to allow group work in the classroom to progress. For example, the teacher can have a group of students with the blue set of carriages, another with the orange set, and so forth.