This board game was devised to use with small groups, or in one-to-one tutoring sessions, to reinforce recognition and use of different sentence structures (simple, compound and complex) but also includes vocabulary cards which encourage understanding, use and spelling of useful words, some of which are often misspelt. There are three boards which all differ but the cards can be used with all of them. The idea of the game is to be the first to reach the "finish" but the player is only able to move to the square indicated by the dice if the instruction on that square is completed correctly. This could be the student identifying a sentence type on a card, or producing a sentence of their own using any of a variety of conjunctions, also expecting the correct use of punctuation. As well as alternate game boards, sets of cards are included: there are sentence cards, two types of conjunction cards and word cards. Instructions are included but do not have to be followed rigidly and the game could easily be adapted to your own needs. I have used this game with year 7 and 8 but it could also be used with year 6 and even year 9 students.

This activity was created as a bit of fun writing leading up to Christmas. The idea is to get the students to practise their letter writing skills, thinking about their audience, style and appropriate language. I envisage this being a semi-formal letter style but in a fun and light-hearted way which allows the students to use their imagination and be creative in the way they write as if they are Father Christmas. It can also be used for work on inference to see if students can work out what is being described before they get to the paragraph mentioning the Christmas tree, and to see if they can decide who is writing the narrative before they get to the task instructions.