Contractions

5/17/20

With the recent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), many children are at home because schools are closed. Education and fun, however, should not stop. Here is a spreadsheet I created that gets kids practicing contractions.

I searched the Internet for as many contractions, and their uncontracted versions, as I could. I entered the results into two columns. You can modify these lists however you wish. For example, I took out about 20 very uncommon contractions, to leave me with 60 contractions. You will see a column of random numbers near the list of contractions. These are used to sort, which randomly samples 10 contractions out of 60 without replacement (i.e. cannot sample the same contraction more than once).

Then, these 10 selected contractions are shuffled again using another column of 10 random numbers. The idea is to shuffle the contracted or uncontracted versions so the student can draw a line to match them.

The entire process is done using a Visual Basic macro. Just type control-m to run the "contractions" macro.

Note that I set the Print Area, that is, the area that will be printed out when you click Print, to be the area with the words in the outlined box. This way, you can just open up the spreadsheet, run the macro, and print, and you're good to go.

Click here to download the spreadsheet. Feel free to edit the spreadsheet and/or macro as needed. If you find this spreadsheet useful, please credit Statisticool.com.

Thanks for reading.