Today was a good day. I had one of those moments in teaching when you just stop, smile, and think to yourself: "This is what I am meant to do." It. Was. Awesome.
I recently decided to ditch my county grammar text books for another book I discovered in our professional library. It's called The Giggly Guide to Grammar, and my kids LOVE it! It takes the oh-so-boring topics of nouns, verbs, sentence structure, etc. and turns them into entertaining lessons that keep the kids engaged. And best of all...they actually look forward to our next lesson.
Today's activity was a wrap up of our study on nouns. We haven't covered all the information about nouns, but this addressed their ability to determine if a word was a noun. It also allowed them to show me that they know the difference between a common noun and a proper noun. It went like this:
The students were to create a list of 20 nouns. They could be ANY noun, as long as they did not use the name of a friend, teacher, or family member. I told them to mix it up between common and proper nouns, and person, place, thing, and idea nouns. When they were finished, they swapped papers with a friend and checked over the list to make sure each word was, in fact, a noun.
Then (this was the fun part!) I gave the students a copy of a short Mad Libs type story with 20 blanks spaces. They were to fill in the blank spaces with the nouns from their friends' lists without looking at the sentences. After that, they read their completed stories to one another. My room was FILLED with the wonderful sound that is the laughter of children. They enjoyed themselves and I enjoyed listening to their crazy stories, too. The highlight was when of my students asked, "Can we do this kind of thing for our next unit?!?" Who could say no to that?
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