Parts of Speech! Week 3, 2012

Parts of Speech Jeopardy!

After a couple weeks of working out the different kinds of parts of speech, it was time to put the kids to the test!

Stuff you'll need: 
- Cue cards (or piece of paper the size of cue cards)
- Tape 

Prep time (should only take 5-10 minutes): 
What you'll need to do to prepare for this game is start by writing out different kinds of parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc) on each card. One per card. For example, the first card would say: School - a noun card. Do this for about 15 cards. Afterwards, you're going to prepare for the bonus round. On these cards, you'll write down a complete sentence on each card. For example, one could say "Mr. Darcy and I travelled all the way from New York City to Maine." For these cards, underline a certain part of speech. So, if you're going to focus on 'verbs' for that card, you could underline 'travelled". After you've made about 5-10 bonus cards, stick them up on the wall (face down so no one can see the words) in lines of five, then you are ready to play! 
 
How to play: 
Split your group up into two teams. Pick a team to choose a card on the wall first. Once they have chosen a card, read out the word. The children must then discuss within their group - quietly so the other team won't hear them - what they believe the answer is. After a specific allotted amount of time (whatever you feel your children need), ask the teams to whisper to you their answer, this way the other team won't steal their answer. If the team is right, they get a point! If both teams are right, they both get a point! If a team is wrong, no point. Continue this until you are out of Round 1 cards. Afterwards, begin the Bonus Round. For this round you will read out the entire sentence and ask children to find a specific part of speech within it. As with the first round, if they get it, they get the point. There is something special about the bonus round, though. Many sentences tend to have more than one specific part of speech. So, you could read out this sentence "Reed sat on the bench waiting for his Coach to let him play football." Notice, there are three verbs in that sentence. You could say, for every verb a team finds they will get a point! At the end, count up the points and the team with the most points wins!!

Tips: 
- I used ages 8-11 for this game.
- Boys v.s. Girls formed an outstanding competition.
- When the bonus round does come along, some children require a visual of the sentence. Some children work better while looking at the sentence instead of just hearing it. If this is a concern, a whiteboard is a great help. Write out the sentence as you read it to them.

Parts of Speech! Week 2 - 2012

Activity 1: Word Balloon Race

Regular Air Filled Balloons

Flour Filled Balloon without label

Items you'll need:
- 15 balloons
- 3 boxes/bins
- Paper
- Tape

This is an excellent game for children who always want to be up and moving instead of sitting with a paper and pen, who need to learn or practice differentiating nouns, verbs and adjectives. What you will need to do is fill around 15 balloons. After they are full - of either air or flour/rice - you can begin to tape different adjectives, nouns, and verbs onto the balloons. then you can lay them all down on the flour and put your three bins, which need to be labelled a part of speech, on different sides of the room. Game on! Children will take turns, one at a time, being timed at how long it takes them to put all the balloons in the bins. the student with the best time wins!

Optional: this was the first time playing this game, as I had just come up with it, and I noticed some children would be getting them wrong, but getting a better time because they weren't really thinking too deeply. So, should the child with the least amount right but the best time still win? Your choice. For the 11 year olds, I said, for every balloon you get wrong, you add on another 5 seconds. Mix it up, do whatever works for you and your kids!   

Tips: 
- If you would like to make this more challenging, perhaps, you could add more balloons to the pile, or even add more parts of speech (i.e. prepositions or pronouns.)

You may have noticed above, I mentioned flour/rice balloons. When I did this game, the majority of my balloons were filled with flour. The reason for this is to make a new excitement, regular balloons are just regular balloons and it's surprising how much a little thing can change a child's attitude towards an activity, especially when it' comes to writing or grammar. Also, at the end, I announced if everything went well, I would give out the flour balls at the end (because they are actually used as homemade stress balls.). If you are interested in this, here's helpful instructions on how to do so:  link

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Activity 2: Word Hunt!

       After a fast paced race against time aka Word Balloon Race, this is a good cool down activity. Basically, this is a good way for you to recognize where each child is individually in their understanding of the parts of speech. You can do this by handing the sheets out and collecting them after or you could so as I do and verbally read aloud the directions and the sentences, so when everyone has finished the sentence, you move onto the next. Everyone will move along at the same pace that way. But that's not necessary unless you have children who have trouble with their attention spans (ADD or ADHD children).   

Here is a link to download my worksheet for free: http://www.scribd.com/doc/109538497

Enjoy and everyone have a great week! 

Parts of Speech! Week 1 - 2012

For the first week of the creative writing program this year, I stripped back everything and went back to the basics. Every year, I get an assortment of new and returning kids and every year, the kids have forgotten - or have never known - most of the basic facts of writing (.i.e parts of speech, sentence structure, paragraph structure.) Don't forget, this applies to all ages of children. I have children ranging from the age of 8-13. Some of the 13 year old children have no what a noun is. It's always good to start off at the basics, even if just to find out where the child stands. If he has no problem, then you know he'll have no problem moving into the harder stuff. Otherwise, spend a little more time on the basics.

I started off by writing the definitions of every part of speech on the white board (For the younger children, I only concentrated on nouns, verbs and adjectives.) When the children arrived, I covered up the definitions and asked what they thought each one individually was - most were not answered correctly. After showing them the definitions for each, I asked for examples, just to clarify everyone understood. (Note: I noticed that not only the younger children, but also the older children, struggled with adjective. Converse with them about this one. For example, I asked them, "What words would you use to describe the table you are sitting at?" Some said, "Grey." "Hard." "Cold." "Big." I said, "Exactly. Each one of those words described the table, making them describing words aka adjectives.") After that: Game time!

Paper Bag Chaos

Items needed:
- 8 paper bags
- Plenty of cue cards (or some sheets of paper the size of a cue card)
- pencils
- Candy or some sort of other award (Optional)

For this game, children are given a stack of cue cards and asked to put at least one card in each paper bag. Each paper bag will be tagged as a specific part of speech (.i.e. the pronoun bag). Children must remember that the card needs to go in the correct bag, but also that only one word can be on each card. (I had to stress the latter reminder frequently. Most children would write "Johnny runs down the street" instead of Runs for the verb bag.) Once the bags are full, the competition is on! Empty the bags into a pile on the table. Children must now take the cue cards, containing the different traditional parts of speech, and form sentences with them. Every time a child completes a sentence, give them a point. After your time allotment is over, announce the winner.

If the children are finding this too easy and you noticed that are breezing through the game ahead of everyone else, mix it up and challenge them. Later on in the game, I announced that children who formed sentences longer than four words would receive two points per sentence, they all went wild. Man, did they have no trouble turning their competitive sides on! 

Age range:
I played this game with children from 8-13, all were very engrossed and competitive during this game. As I noted above, for the younger children, I only concentrated on the verbs, nouns, and adjectives. I provided them with the rest of the parts of speech, but if you feel your child/children are ready to conquer more than the three, then by all means, challenge 'em! 

Tips:
- Note: Add a couple A's and An's into the pile to help them out a bit.

It should also begin with an introduction...

Hey! My name's Lina. I'm a writer and I've been running a creative writing class at an after school program for over two years now. Recently, as I was contemplating the difficulty of finding fun writing activities for kids/preteen, I thought "Maybe it's because of people like you who don't post what works for you!" Which is what brought me here, on blogger, starting a blog that features the activities and ideas - for not only creative writing but also language comprehension in general - for children. I will also let you know how it worked when I did it. Perhaps, it didn't work with a big group, or younger children struggled with it, or children with ADHD loved it, these are comments I will leave to assist anyone else out there struggling to find some great activities that work and interest children.

(Plus, this will also work as a great archive and reference for myself lol! I'm always losing my old activities sheets...)  

Anyhow, I cannot wait to share with all of you the ideas I have created with this bizarre - yet quite helpful when working with children - mind of mine.