Here’s a fun Halloween language arts activity for kids. It’s super easy and it’s a great grammar review! Click here for the free printable PDF: Grammatical Poetry- Halloween
Grammatical Poetry – Halloween
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Category Archives: Language Arts
Halloween Parts of Speech Activities!
I’ve always enjoyed teaching parts of speech. And who doesn’t love Halloween!?! So I thought these two things together could only turn out fun. So here are 2 free printable worksheets to help kids practice identifying nouns, verbs and adjectives. Click the following links to see/print the PDFs: page 1 page 2 The following page was submitted by a fellow teacher. She wanted to have her kids use this as a starting point for more writing: Parts of Speech pages- back side
Click here for more fun and free Halloween activities for kids!
Practice Writing Dialogue with Funny Animal Pictures
Kids sometimes struggle with knowing how to punctuate dialogue in their writings. So here’s a way fun activity for you to practice this as a whole class. Print out a copy of these pictures of animals in Halloween costumes and put them under your document camera. If you’ve got a way to connect your computer to your projector, then you don’t have to print the pages. But either way, show the class the picture and decide on a sentence to write as a class. Point out where quotation marks go and how the fit with whatever punctuation mark is at the end. If you want some independent practice, have your kids write their sentences on personal whiteboards so they can hold it up to show you. Happy (grammatically correct) Halloween!
Click here for the free printable PDFs: Halloween Costume Animals – dialogue practice
Biography Writing Template for Kids
I had a request to make this biography template. I made one for lower grades (includes spaces for name, life information, contributions and picture) and one for upper grades (includes spaces for name, birth/death, early life, adult life, contributions, picture). Click here for the free printable PDFs:
Name Reading Groups to Teach Extra Stuff!
When I first started teaching, I didn’t know what to call each reading group. Although students are grouped by reading level, you can’t name them with numbers or letters (or anything that indicates one’s higher or lower than another, even though students will figure it out eventually). So I chose animals our school had die-cuts for. But I wish I had heard of this idea before I named the groups!
One Arizona teacher names her groups after the various desert cactus plants in her region. She teaches the kids how to pronounce them and has a picture on the wall next to the name, so the kids will become more educated about their region! So smart!! Here are her posters of the cactus reading group pictures. This is a great way to sneak a little extra learning into your classroom.
Grammar Dictation Sheet (Spelling)
One of my teacher friends recently told me that their district just changed their policies to outlaw traditional spelling tests. Instead they do “dictation” with a small set of spelling words (8-10 for second grade). The set of words all focus on specific sounds. For example, they might choose “kn” or “sh” or “eigh” that week. Every day the teacher hands out a sheet (similar to the one below) and says the sounds and the students have to write the sound. Then the teacher says a sentence that includes one or more of the words for the week and the kids have to write it. The sentences are the same on Monday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday. Then on Friday, the teacher chooses one sentence from Monday and one sentence from Tuesday. It’ll be interesting to see how much better/worse the students are at spelling because of this new system.
Grammar dictation sheet (16 lines)- PDF
Dictation sheet PDF- 10 lines
Grammatical Poetry – Fall
I fell in love with the idea of grammatical poetry when I saw it. It turns out fun and silly poem and gives kids a painless, quick review of grammar! Here’s a free printable template for fall grammatical poetry. Click here for the Grammatical Poetry- fall. Enjoy!
Great Language Arts Ideas
I never get tired of Pinterest. There are so many great ideas, and it’s just fun! Here are some of my favorite finds as of late…
Use clips to connect the letter cards to make words. Also helps develop fine motor skills… and it’s just a fun way to activity to use with spelling words! (source)
Make a salt tray and grab some alphabet cards. Easy to make and kids have fun smoothing out the salt after correctly making the letter. (source)
Craft a kite that displays contractions! Super simple, and it would make a great classroom bulletin board! (source). Click here for more activities using contractions.
Squarehead Teachers 