Provide hands-on activities for practice and mastery. Check for understanding of concepts and skills by using relevant standard materials, i.e. worksheets, text problems, workbooks, teacher prepared exercises, etc.

Practice With Parts of Speech

Objective: Students will practice using nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Activity: Practice in the proper use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs is done using workbooks, written language activities, and oral language activities such as the following:
1. Pop An Adjective: Describe a person or object in the room on a small slip of paper. (Only positive things should be said when describing a person.) Fold the slips, enclose in balloons, blow up and tie the balloons. Students exchange the balloons, pop them, read the descriptive words, and try to identify the object or person described.
2. Adjective Collage: Cut out pictures of things (nouns) from magazines and paste them on construction paper. Label each picture with its name and an adjective that best describes it.
3. Language Tic-Tac-Toe: Play tic-tac-toe to review the four parts of speech. Each student draws a grid on a sheet of paper and numbers the squares randomly from 1 to 9. (Make sure the numbers are small and placed in the corner of each box.) Call out a number and a word. Students write N in the appropriately numbered square if the word is a noun, V if a verb, ADJ if adjective, and ADV if an adverb. Three of a kind in a row wins.
4. Language Bingo: Prepare traditional format Bingo cards (five spaces down and five spaces across with FREE in the center). Randomly arrange the four parts of speech in the squares. As the words are called, cover the correct part of speech.
5. Accidental Writing: Ask each student to think of interesting words to complete the following sentence. The (adjective) (noun) will (verb) the (adjective) (noun). For variety, have different groups form a list of words for one part of speech, then randomly choose a word from each group to fill in the blanks. Some interesting and unusual combinations can result, such as “The exquisite horse will drink the young wine.” This activity also serves as means of breaking students free from their habitual way of looking at things. Students could draw a picture illustrating the sentence or construct a story around it.
6. Illustrated Words: Make words look like their meaning by altering the shape, texture, and arrangement of the letters. Examples:
T
A
L
L
7. Sorting Activities: Make word cards for the four parts of speech and label four containers, one for each part of speech. Students place the word cards in the appropriately labeled container. (I use old reading charts and vocabulary cards and Pringle’s cans.) As a bonus activity, students can put words together in sentences.
8. Newspaper Activity: Cut out words from newspapers and glue them onto paper by parts of speech or arrange them in sentences.
Evaluation: Quality and accuracy of practice and quizzes.