Through this game, young children recognize words and their relationships to each other. On several index cards write nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. Attach clear and explicit pictures of the words you wrote on the cards. For nouns, if you wrote cat, dog, food, boy, girl, monster, make sure you have pictures to depict those. Make cards of several action verbs along with understandable pictures of walk, run, eat, cry and more. You may break the adjectives into colors, emotions and more. Some examples are, red, green, angry, happy and so on. Make a list of cards with the articles, 'a,' 'an' and 'the,' and conjunctions 'and,' 'but.' Pronouns such as 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' 'they' and so on are useful. Make some helping verb cards such as 'is,' 'was,' 'am' and more. Also, make a set of cards with the punctuation marks. Explain to the children what each of the cards means.
Make separate piles of the different types of cards, and make a sentence. Instruct the children that they may use one sentence to tell a story with any of the cards. As an example, if they say, "The dog is eating his food," place the card with the picture of the dog on the table, then the card with the picture of the verb 'eat,' side by side. The idea is to expand from there. Then insert 'is.' At every stage, ask the children for input and help by explaining what each word is doing to tell the story. Clarify the concept of tense and how the words change. Make up funny sentences: "The red cat ate the happy monster."
On colorful construction paper, the size of a regular page, write numerous sentences, some of which are grammatically correct and some incorrect. For example, "I am going home" is grammatically correct, but "I is going home" is not. Also, write sentences that seem grammatically correct but make no sense, "The chair sat on me." Always have the correct version available, such as, "I sat on the chair." Make sure you have colorful pictures on every card, which depict what the sentence is saying. This not only makes it more enjoyable, but it also reinforces the importance of sentence structure and grammar. You read the sentence out loud and show the picture. The children decide whether it is a correct sentence or not. Have a discussion why it is or isn't correct. You can make the game competitive by creating several teams and giving a gold star or coin to the team that answers first with the correct answer. The team with the most coins wins.
You will find the link to a jigsaw puzzle template in the resources. Print it out on colored paper. With a magic marker, write a sentence by placing one word in each puzzle piece. Do this in a way so that when the puzzle is put together the sentence will read correctly. Glue this sheet on a piece of cardboard. Print out another sheet with a picture on it. You will find a "Coloring Pages" link in the resources. You may choose a picture from there. Some of these picture pages are available in black and white and others in color. Glue this page on the other side of the cardboard. Carefully cut out the jigsaw pieces. Have the children put the puzzle together, then read and discuss the sentences. Tactile games make the process of learning abstract concepts easier.
Many online sites have interactive computer games that are helpful for learning sentence structure. Some sites have free downloadable interactive games in PowerPoint format. These are age-appropriate simple games the children can play. You will find these links both in the references and resources.