Grammar Game (for elementary aged kids)
Do you wish your kids knew their parts of speech? Try this.
Over the next few weeks, choose a different part of speech each week. Begin, for instance, with nouns. Talk over breakfast about what a noun is:
person, place, thing or idea
Then discuss examples: bowl (for cereal), chair, nuthatch, Mike (across the table), sister, love… and so on.
Later that day, or the next day, distribute magazines and have the kids cut out noun words and noun pictures. Put in a ziplock bag.
At the end of the week, using a posterboard or tag board, create a collage using both pictures and words. These can be put together in odd ways (the word “love” stuck on a “duck” picture). Or they can be arranged into noun poems. Or they can be random with no rhyme or reason.
Label the poster “Nouns” and you’re done!
This can be done with verbs too (pictures of actions).
For adjectives, the poster can be smaller and simply be a collage of words. I like to have kids use adjectives that describe self – then a photo of the child can be added to the collage of words.
For prepositions, have fun. Cut out the words: in, out, under, over, below, beside, above, around, through and so on. Then create pictures that show these by cutting out, for instance, a dog and a house. Put the dog “above” the house with the word “above.” Put an airplane “below” a tree with the word “below.” And so on.
Be surreal (it’s much more fun).
Julie
Julie,
This is a zany, fun, GREAT idea! I can’t wait to try it with the boys!
God Bless,
Donna
If putting pen to paper isn’t a problem, I once asked a client to tell me something fun about her vacation. She said, “It was cool.” (typical) I started laughing, and giving her a hard time. “You went to California and camped, and hugged redwoods and visited relatives, and it was cool? Cool amazing or cool fun or cool kinda boring?” She started laughing and said, “kinda fun and amazing.” Soon we were creating a list of words to express cool, putting them in order of “coolness” from mildly interesting to fantastic. (We worked down the other end to boring, uneventful, etc. We had the thesaurus out. Then she proceeded to tell me about different events on the vacation and she assigned them variations of “cool.” A few sessions later we were into writing as a word game. She chose to tell a camping story using only nouns and verbs. It was funny because it is hard to do. She had to be choosy and she was enjoying the game. Then she added adjectives. Then adverbs. By propositions we were both ready to move on. But after it all, she had fun with some grammar and more importantly, vocabulary expansion.
great ideas! my 5th grader is all done with the basic parts of speech…will hold onto your suggestions until #2 is ready! any ideas for prepositions?