I remember when I was in Elementary school, English was one of my favorite subjects. I think it was because I liked subjects where there was a clear answer, such as what part of speech a word was. However, once I finished a unit, I rarely remembered the parts of speech until they came around again the next year. I think there are two reasons for this which I try to remedy in my own teaching: lack of understanding and no review.
SHALLOW UNDERSTANDING OF PARTS OF SPEECH
In order to remember things, you have to make a connection in your brain. If you don’t understand the concepts well enough to do that, you won’t remember. I knew enough to get A’s on my paper. Not enough to tell you why one word is considered one part of speech and why another isn’t.
Did you know, for example, that there is a specific order to how adjectives are ordered in a sentence? Most of us probably never learned this, though most native English speakers do it automatically.
LACK OF REVIEW
Second, there was little review after I went over one part of speech. There’s a debate about whether to teach grammar skills in isolation or integrated with all language arts. Generally, teaching with all language arts is best. However, I believe in teaching each part of speech in isolation first, and then combining with other language arts as a continual review. Some teachers use daily oral language or mentor texts for this, with daily practice.
Main goal is to teach a deeper understanding of all of the parts of speech (and other types of grammar), rather than handing out worksheets with little instruction. So, here’s what I do to help build understanding:
TEACHING PARTS OF SPEECH
To introduce the topic, I generally ask what students already know about the part of speech, and ask them to give me examples. Then I go over the part of speech and list its rules.
Sometimes I don’t give students the information up front. Instead, I make the students discover the rules on their own. They’ll look up examples of the parts of speech, analyze how they’re used, and then come up with the rules on their own.
GROUP ACTIVITY
Every time I go over a new part of speech or one of the specific types (such as proper nouns, possessive nouns, etc.), I do a group activity. The activities that I choose help them to go deeper into the uses of each part of speech. As I mentioned above, when students discover the rules on their own, they do that in a small group, and then each group creates a poster with their rules on it.
Sometimes we do group games, such as a board game. We also do an activity where students have to create a song to help them remember helping verbs.
INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE
Finally, students do need some time to practice on their own. I always provide some type of worksheet for them to do also. As with the rules, the worksheets are best if they are asked to go deeper into the parts of speech. For example, instead of just having students choose whether a word is a preposition or an adverb, they have to also include how they know.
TEACHING PARTS OF SPEECH MATERIALS
My mom and I worked very hard to create units to help with teaching parts of speech. Each has specific lessons about each topic within each part of speech, group activities for every lesson, individual work sheets, and task cards to help students review all that was learned. Take a look at them by clicking the pictures below.
