Welcome to "Tea with Julie," a weekly missive by me, Julie Bogart. My wish is to give you food for thought over a cup of tea to enhance your life as an educator, parent, and awesome adult. Glad you're here. Pinkies up!
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Cincinnati, September 9, 2023
Hi Friend,
Make grammar fun! Below are a few ideas. Just pick one and get started! No more grammar guilt.
Play with Nouns
Turn nouns into verbs:
- I chaired the meeting,
- I tabled the discussion,
- I forked over the money,
- I couched my words in apologies…
Parts of Speech at Breakfast
Over breakfast, identify the parts of speech for every action you perform and item you use. Stump each other, if you can. I chowed the chow while chewing. (Chowed: verb, Chow: noun, Chewing: gerund)
Picture/Word Collage
Choose a different part of speech each week. Begin, for instance, with nouns.
- Talk about what a noun is (a person, place, thing, or idea).
- Discuss examples: bowl, chair, nuthatch, Mike (across the table), love...
- Later, distribute magazines and have the kids cut out noun words and pictures.
- Put images in a ziplock bag.
- At the end of the week, using a posterboard or tag board, create a collage with pictures and words.
- These can be put together in odd ways (the word “love” stuck on a “duck” picture).
- Or they can be arranged into noun poems.
- Or they can be random with no rhyme or reason.
- Label the poster “Nouns” and you’re done!
This can be done with verbs too (pictures of actions).
For adjectives, the poster can be smaller and simply be a collage of words. I like to have kids use adjectives that describe self – then a photo of the child can be added to the collage of words.
For prepositions, have fun. Cut out the words: in, out, under, over, below, beside, above, around, through and so on. Then create pictures that show these by cutting out, for instance, a dog and a house. Put the dog “above” the house with the word “above.” Put an airplane “below” a tree with the word “below.” And so on.
The good news? We give activities like these in all of our literature + grammar programs! We just updated and added two favorites back to our shop:
Rooting for you every day!
Warmly,
P.S. Catch up on all the “Tea with Julie” emails here! Follow me on Instagram.
Julie Bogart
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