Are you working with parts of speech? Want to add complexity to what is often a mind-numbingly-dull task?
Here’s what I did!
- I chose one word that could be used in multiple ways.
- I wrote a paragraph using that word as many times as I could.
- I asked my students to figure out the part of speech for each use of that one word.
Here’s an example using the word “ground” which can be a noun, verb, or adjective. Feel free to change the tense or add suffixes.
When my mom saw how much pepper I had ground, she grounded me for a week. I just sat on the ground in my room, grinding my teeth in frustration and eating ground pepper. My life had turned into a real grind and I vowed never to grind that much pepper again.
Ridiculous right? But my kids loved this. AND, it really pushed them to think about parts of speech in a way they hadn’t before. AND AND, it naturally led to them creating their own paragraphs bursting with the same word used in different ways. “Mr. Byrd, is it okay if I make one of these paragraphs?”
Students could write paragraphs based around words like:
- lie
- leave
- help
- head
- hard
Oh, and we called this a Parts of Speech Party! Here’s a PowerPoint file of the “ground” paragraph (with answers).