Learn Spanish British Council

I’ve been teaching my kids about the parts of speech in our lately.  I started with a quick overview about how our words do jobs for us.  We used this to briefly go over the parts of speech so the kids could understand what they were and the jobs they do in writing and speech.  Then I assigned a part of speech to each day and we did some activities to help reinforce the ideas over the next couple of weeks.

 Parts of Speech Activities We Did:

• Watched the that went with each part of speech.  They are oldies, but goodies.  I learned parts of speech from them when I was a kid and I can still sing you every song.  Now my kids join in with me too.
• Brainstormed a word list on our white board of example words for each part of speech.
• Played with a lot of mad libs and then even wrote our own.  The kids started by writing a one page story.  Then they erased key words out of each sentence, filling in a blank line and an appropriate part of speech label under the blank.  Then we supplied our own words according to the label, and the author of the mad lib got to read them out loud to everyone.  We laughed our heads off.  They were hilarious.
• Read paragraphs from some of our favorite books, picking out instances of that part of speech.
• Had a race.  I wrote various words on index cards and put them in piles in the middle of the room.  I hung signs for each part of speech up on the walls around the room.  Each kid had to deliver all their index cards to the correct part of speech and race to the finish line first.
• Diagrammed Mother Goose Rhymes.  I underlined certain words from the rhymes, and they rewrote the verse and labeled each underlined word with the correct part of speech.
• Made a flip book that listed each part of speech.  When you flip the page up, you can see the job it does and some example words.

The biggest sheet is a full size sheet of construction paper.  Each page was reduced by one ruler’s width from the one underneath it.  We just put our rulers down along the bottom edge, traced the edge with  pencil, and then cut along the line.  We sharply creased each page so it would easily flip up along the crease mark.  Then we hole punched the top and attached it together with brads.  Here you can see what the flip sides of the pages look like.

Of course, we’ll keep adding to these as we come across interesting words, and my kids now have their flip books by their side as they write so they can get ideas for vivid words and remember to use lots of description and full sentences as they write.  We also use the flipbooks to quiz ourselves as we review parts of speech.

All in all, learning about the parts of speech has been really fun.  We took a normally dry topic and put some life into it.  It has also given me a foothold for asking my kids to improve their writing.  Now when I come across “The cat sat” in their writing, I can say, “Throw in a preposition, an adverb, and an adjective in there and you’ll have a good looking sentence.”  And by golly, they can do it.

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