Clifford & Commands {Teaching Imperative Sentences}

Every once in a while, I get a BRILLIANT idea. It always comes in the middle of my lesson. I literally say, “WAIT. Let’s try this…” Have you had those moments before? It happened to me today when I started teaching commands or as common core calls it “imperative sentences”.

It all started with my little Clifford stuffed animal that I saw in my library and my million Clifford books I inherited from a retiring teacher.

I was in the middle of teaching commands {or imperative sentences as common core calls it} and I saw little Clifford just hanging out in the library.

I thought, how perfect would it be to give commands to Clifford?

Side note: I am also ALL ABOUT that picture book life.

I grabbed Clifford and one of the fun little books of his and got to work.

My students had front loaded info, like we are working on types of sentences, one being “imperative” which means “command: telling someone to do something”.

We also have a silly little stomp we do to remember.

We stomp one foot and point a finger and yell “IMPERATIVE”, we wag our finger and say “telling someone to do something”.

They love it. They feel bossy. 1st graders love bossy. 1st graders ARE bossy.

We start the lesson by introducing commands, we always love BrainPop Jr. and Scratch Garden for great little intro videos.

I then showed them my little Clifford. I told them we’d be reading about Clifford and looking for ways Emily {his owner} and others give him commands.

We sat on the carpet, with clipboards in our laps, this paper, and a pencil.

I read Clifford’s Manners {affiliate link} aloud to the students and reflected on each page there was a command.

We then jotted it down.

Next we read through the pictures again and came up with our own commands that we could give Clifford {examples: Get down, Clifford!, or Be careful.}.

It was so much fun! My students had a blast coming up with fun commands to tell Clifford.

We then extended it by drawing a detailed picture and writing a command underneath.

After we gave Clifford commands, we moved on to a dinosaur, from Danny and the Dinosaur! Such a darling story about a boy and a dinosaur, they go out all day together and Danny, the boy, gives lots of commands. We did similar activities with the dinosaur.

There are also a few more fun activities in there! If you’d like these little FREEBIES to teach commands, download them from my TpT store!

Enjoy! <<see what I did there?? I command you to “enjoy”!

*This post contains affiliate links.