There are two kinds of teachers in the world. Those that integrate their grammar instruction and those that teach it at a separate time. Which are you? I teeter back and forth between the two. I like to think of my grammar instruction as mini lessons, that help with developing the concept, then the application piece, the integration. Here is a simple grammar activity that can be used for any grammar skill.
We use Thinking Maps in my district (which are AMAZING if you haven’t been trained) to help students organize their thoughts. For this activity (we were working on common and proper nouns), I created a HUGE bridge map across the back of my classroom (I used washi tape and wet erase markers). Since I’m a first grade teacher, I pre-wrote some matching common and proper nouns on index cards. I also color coded all the common nouns dark blue and proper nouns light blue (this was to take out some of the difficulty in find a matching pair for my littles).
I shuffled all the index cards together and gave each student a word. Then they had to travel around the room to find the common or proper noun that matched their card. Once they found their partner, they sat down. We debriefed and shared all our matches. My students thought this was a blast, so we did it several times.
After, we hung them up on our bridge map in the back of our classroom, using it as a reference as needed. I loved having this “interactive map” in the back of our room so we could add more as we were reading and writing in other subjects. I’m also able to take off the common and proper nouns and use it for other related grammar skills like singular/plural nouns, past/present verbs, and more!
For upper grades, you can modify this activity by allowing them to write pairs of common and proper nouns. Increase the difficulty by not color coding.
Need more grammar activities? Check out my grammar category on the blog OR my grammar Pinterest board.
[…] Learn More: Sparkling in Second […]