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.