We have been working on nouns for the past two weeks and have done some fun activities! Some of these great activities were inspired by my team mate Jenn, former ELD teacher/ grammar queen :) We started out by introducing nouns as a person, place, thing or animal. Every day we made a circle map for each type of noun. After brainstorming the circle map, each student got an index card to write and illustrate that type of noun. The kids got really creative! We did this 4 times, one for each type of noun.
The following week we did a different noun activity each day. Monday we sorted nouns. I borrowed 4 hula hoops from the PE teacher and we used picture cards from our reading series. I gave each student a card and we went around in a circle reading the card and deciding if it was a person, place, thing or animal. Next I got out the index cards that they students had illustrated the previous week (mixed up) and partnered the kids up. Each pair got a stack of about 8 cards and they had to decide which hoop to place their cards in. We sat back down in a circle and checked the hoops, making changes if necessary.
Tuesday we made a tree map of People, Places, Things, Animals. The kids were cute and listed each other as the people and their favorite places such as Wal Mart, Circle K, and McDonald's.
Wednesday we used the tree map to create silly sentences. I modeled by making a sentence using one noun from each category. For example "The
teacher took her
frog to
Mc Donald's and ate
donuts." Then the kids were able to make their own sentences using the tree map. They really got a kick out of this. We wrote the sentences in our journals and underlined the nouns.
Thursday we got out our reading series anthology book and read the stories we have read so far chorally. We made a list of the nouns from each story and made tally marks next to the nouns that were repeated.
We'll start verbs this week, I see a lot of kinesthetic activities in our future!
