Preposition Proposition

Prepositions (eg. in, on, under, from etc) are a major part of speech.

In this game, your students are going to practice forming a chain of prepositions to see who can keep the chain going for longer.  

A worksheet has been provided for this activity.
 

Objective(s) of activity:
Starting from the basic sentence “The girl saw a dog”, students within groups are going to take turns adding preposition phrases to the sentence.

Each subsequent preposition must be in a class of meaning (Time, Position, Direction, and ‘Other’) that is different from the previous one.

When a person is unable to add anymore prepositions, they have lost the round.
 

Directions:
You will use this worksheet to do this activity.

There are two tasks that have to be done in the worksheet before you can play this game. These two tasks are to:

1. Generate English prepositions that belong in each one of the four categories.
2. Come up with sentences for each of them so that you can be sure that your students know how to use each one.

 
Suggested answers are provided in the worksheet.
 
Once this is completed, your students can keep the worksheet in front as a reminder of what the different classes of prepositions are.

Now it is time to play the game proper.
 
One person will come up with a sentence that will serve as the base for building prepositions.
 
Eg. John walked the dog.
 
The other person will then have to add a preposition phrase to this sentence.
 
Eg. John walked the dog to the park.
 
The next player will then have to add a preposition phrase to this sentence from the start. However, there are two rules:

1. The whole sentence (including all preposition phrases) have to be said before adding their own preposition phrase.
2. The newly added preposition phrase cannot be in the same category as the one immediately before.

 
The following shows what a good sequence may look like.
A:        John walked the dog.
B:        John walked the dog to the park.
A:        John walked the dog to the park near the beach.
B:        John walked the dog to the park near the beach over the hill.
A:        John walked the dog to the park near the beach over the hill after dinner.
 
The round ends when the next person up is unable to recall the sentence correctly or adds a preposition phrase that is from the same class.
 
The memory component is an integral part of the game and so you should not write down the sentence.
 
This will also put a natural cap on the length of sentences. If this memory component is not present, the round can technically go on for a very long time (which is fine if you’re ok with it).
 
The winner of the round can then come up with the next base sentence to add preposition phrases to. 



Share in the comments how your students did!