Literacy: How to Teach Parts of Speech

Photo by Mathew Needleman

I've been trying to read much as I can about how to teach elementary students to grab the fundamentals on writing. During this past week, I've attended also the first PTA meeting and the visitations to the classroom where my kid will be learning this year, but at the same time we (my wife and I) went to the meeting organised by the Board of Education to recognise perfect achievement of students in the last year State evaluation test (NJ ASK). Our son was one of the achievers with a perfect score in math and there were about 60 students who received the Exceptional Academic Achievement Certificate from Superintendent of Schools. However, what surprised me was that only on single female student gain the perfect score in language!

So, it shows to me that something is going throughout the State. I do recognize the spelling[es] is an issue in most of kids, but I am no so sure if the kids are the ones failing. I think either methods are not reliable or teachers are confronting the process in a way that it's not practically interesting for very young students.

There is where Apple Distinguished Educator's post came just in hand. Mathew Needleman from Creating Lifelong Learners share with us "an engaging activity for teaching parts of speech through song." He says this method is credited to projectglad.com but also recalls to have seen it anywhere else. The system consists of ask students to complete a chart of all parts of speech. Example as follows:

"The green, hairy, monsters, the green, hairy monsters, the green, hairy, funny monsters stomp through the forest.

This works well as a sponge activity before or after recess/lunch. I leave the chart up and refer back to it. When we need a verb, for example, I might say, “Remember, action words…the green ones on our chart?”

You can repeat this activity when starting a new unit as a way of getting student familiar with the new vocabulary for each theme. I don’t require that they use fossil vocabulary, for example, when on the fossil unit but some of it naturally creeps in and makes its way to the chart."

Even when I've checked some literacy links I still will purse for more information on how to help students as the one I have, to achieve easier and better on the problems of writing (with or without) purpose.

Do you have any tips on your head or have you found any interesting link about this theme? Glad to hear from you.

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