Grammar Review Activities: Parts of Speech

These parts of speech activities are all excellent ways to review the eight principle parts of speech. They consist of filling "parts of speech bags" and using the words in them to help students understand how different parts of speech work in one sentence and to make sure students can use the parts of speech grammatically. Students need plenty of review, so you may want to consider trying all of these in one day. Alternately, although the activities build on each other, you can also create the bags and try one of the games alone.

Label each of eight bags with one of the eight principle parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections, and conjunctions. Break the class into teams, and hand one bag to each team. Give each team a stack of note cards and tell them that they have sixty seconds on the clock to write as many words that are that part of speech as possible. When the time is up, have one student from each group read the cards, and ask the class to decide whether all of the cards are indeed the correct part of speech.

Give each team one of the bags from the previous activity. Write a simple sentence on the board, such as “Wow, the brown dog jumped over the fence.” Make a line beneath this sentence for a parallel sentence, and write each of the articles from the first sentence in the same place in the parallel sentence. Tell the students that as you say each remaining word in the sentence, the group that has that part of speech should pick a card from their bag and bring it up to the board. Stick that word under the original word, and continue reading the original sentence. When you’re finished, you should have a new sentence that is grammatically correct, but hopefully entertaining as well! (For example, the new sentence might read, “Yipes, the spotted lunch flew around the kitchen.”)

Set out the bags from the previous activities in a row. Have each student (or pair of students, depending on the number of note cards in each bag), walk along the row and take one note card from each bag;then, have them rearrange the cards to make a long, grammatically correct sentence. (Tell students that they can add articles as needed.) Have each student, or pair of students, post the sentences up on the board.

When you finish these parts of speech activities, you may want to have students refill the bags so that you can reuse them later on. These parts of speech activities can be helpful weeks, or even months, after the unit was taught.

• Grammar Lesson Plan: Adjectives
• Grammar Lesson Plan: Nouns