Twitter for Parts of Speech

Find a Tweet or two (with no swearing or major punctuation/grammar errors*) and ask the children to identify the parts of speech contained in it. They'll be short texts as they've got to be within 140 characters.

  In this example, I found a Tweet with the word 'stamp' in it:

Have this random stamp on my arm and I don't know where how or when I got it

— Colin Bergin (@colinbergin360) 18 March 2017

Here's another...

Ethan was bouncing a basketball around smiling softly to himself "This is fun." He looks up throwing the ball in the hoop

— Ethan (@Cute_KidE) 30 January 2017

* It's a challenge!  

You could even write your own, or get the children to. 

Word Class (Parts of Speach) & Colours

As written about previously, we noticed some children really struggling to remember word classes and therefore not form sentences correctly or know how to improve and develop their sentence structures.

We wrote a sentence, in black text and uploaded it to Google Drive. The children then accessed that Google Doc and changed the colours of each word to show what they thought the word class was. Each child had their own copy of the sentence to work on. After the children had answered, the Doc was locked and the answers discussed.

Word Class (Parts of Speech) Paper Chains

After our recent lesson using emojis to cover word classes, we were thinking about something a little more festive.*

We wrote five sentences, printed them on strips of paper, cut them up and asked children to recreate the sentences as paper chains. Each word class was printed on a different colour so that the children could identify the classes before and after making the sentences**. With the sentences we made, the capitalised words at the start of the sentences, commas and full stops were included on the strips of paper to get the children to think about how that impacted on where in the sentence the word would be placed. Our sentences can be found here.

**The word 'flies' is included as a 'subject'. With some children, an interesting discussion was held about why this word was not included as a 'verb'.

As it turned out, not all children made the original sentences that we had. Not all worked perfectly, as some had not considered tense and plural/singular before constructing the sentence. However, again a good discussion point. 

*Paper chains are not just for Christmas.

Word Classes (Parts of Speech) & Emoji

At the start of December, I shared a lesson I'd carried out with my class utilising the Emoji Keyboard on iPad devices. I've recently done something very similar, but this time with the focus being on word classes (parts of speech).

The emoji symbols give the children a prompt for what they could include in the sentence and next to the emoji is an indication of how that emoji is linked to a word class. In the main, the sentences created were correct. Where errors occurred (adjective / adverb confusion or the wrong noun being used as the subject), it provided the opportunity to address misconceptions. Once children had used my prompts, they were then able to create their own. They had to follow the same process though: create the prompt first and then write the sentences. 

It was interesting to see how children could take the same prompt and create so many different sentences from it.