Grammar | Squarehead Teachers

Parts of speech can be pretty lame to teach (and hard to teach) if you don’t have a good, painless way to do it a little at a time. Here’s what one school does:

Each part of speech is assigned a color (adjectives are brown, nouns are blue, etc.)
Each classroom has the same posters up (so there’s consistency as the kids move through the grades).
Teachers use sticky tabs to add examples of the part of speech to the poster.
The class diagrams a sentence on the board by moving magnets (foam squares with a magnet on the back) above the words to identify them.
Kids record these sentences and identify parts of speech in their literacy notebooks.

Parts of speech posters.

Parts of speech posters.

Literacy journal page

Magnets for diagramming sentences on the board.

Teachers today are expected to teach EVERYTHING!

But there’s just not enough time! As money for fine arts dwindles, kids are getting less and less music in school. I could quote any of a million studies that show music helps with academics and character development, but I won’t. Instead, I present my “Musicians To Know” series. It’s 10 single-page grammar practice activities that teach kids about the most influential musicians of all time. The activities involve identifying parts of speech, prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, using a dictionary and thesaurus, etc. There’s even a little simple math thrown in. Appropriate for 5th grade and up is my guess, but I don’t know your class, so you be the judge.