I don't know about you, but getting my students to use sentences is quite difficult. For our state testing, there are multiple tasks that require my students to "generate a sentence". Yikes! I know my kiddos get the concept and I can get them to show me this in multiple ways, but generating a sentence is not currently one of them!
We have been working on this skill in multiple ways. The most successful one I've had is to use a sentence creation graphic organizer.
We began with one that was filled in with a word bank that I knew included the words needed for the pictures or situations we were addressing.
The student would look at a picture and then follow the sentence graphic organizer (with my prompts). They would end up with a sentence such as "the girl is running in the park", or "the man is cooking in the kitchen". Using pictures and these words, we created multiple sentences! It was so easy and the kiddos really enjoyed the activity!
