The Week Ending October 21st: Parts of Speech Pick Up

I've heard it said:  If you want something done, ask a busy person.  And a busy week it was!  Between running Student Council elections, chairing Red Ribbon Week, and serving as PTA Membership chair, it was non-stop chaos fun!  Oh, and there was teaching too!!

Yes, if you want something done, ask a busy person.  Just don't expect her to get everything done perfectly or exactly on time!  (Ahhh, the [expensive] miracle of RUSH shipping!  Who knew the shipping would be more expensive than the red ribbons!)  

So, now that everything is almost ready and/or finished, I have had a chance to reflect on the week that flew by...

We had a particularly good time with an activity called "Parts of Speech Pick Up." It's a lot like "Mad Libs," but there is movement involved....

My tables are arranged in groups that seat six.  At five of the six chairs, I put a page of words/phrases.  At the sixth chair, I set out two sets because I needed seven parts of speech for this activity (Think ahead, next time, perhaps!)

Students were given a collection sheet.  I told them that I would ring a bell to signal a move to the next chair--and that we would move clockwise (an all-but-forgotten word in the age of digital time telling, I quickly learned!) from chair to chair.

For the past two weeks, we  have been generating and charting lists of words for each part of speech, so the lists we used for this activity were comprised of kid-generated words.

At each stop, the students would look over the collection of words and phrases on the page and then choose the one that they liked best.  This word/phrase was written on the line on their "collection form" that matched the part of speech displayed.

prepositional phrases (time)

Saturday afternoon	just after midnight
last summer	one day in July
in the morning	at 2 am
when I was five	as the sun set
when the school bell rang	in 2009

prepositional phrases (place)

in the park	on the playground
at Target	on stage
on the corner	at Disneyland
in New York City	in Australia
in the forest	in the middle of the ocean

adjectives

hairy	furry
old	orange
nervous	joyful
melancholy	wrinkled
slippery	surprised

adverbs

bravely	quickly
slowly	suddenly
quietly	awkwardly
kindly	gently
loudly	rudely

common nouns

whale	spider
backpack	principal
spaghetti	kindergartner
soccer coach	basketball player
announcer	wrestler

Proper Nouns

Lady Gaga	President Obama
Peyton Manning	Sponge Bob
Justin Timberlake	Kobe Bryant
Xbox	Kit Kat bar
Ferrari	IPhone

verbs

wrestled	tackled
captured	kissed
shouted	ate
ran/ran away	tossed
jumped	teased

Every time I rang the bell, the students moved around the table to a new seat and added a word to their collection.  Once they had moved six times, their page was full.  This meant it was time to craft a sentence...

We decided in advance that verb tenses could be changed to meet the needs of the sentence, that nouns could be made plural, and that articles could be added as necessary.

It was blissfully quiet, punctuated by giggles.  (I was so sorry I didn't video this lesson!) 

We use class cards to select who will share, and kids' eyes were riveted on the deck to see who would be chosen next.  (I love this strategy, by the way.  It eliminates all that hand-waving...).

We could have gone on for an hour.  Most of the sentences were mildly silly, but that was just what we needed on a Friday afternoon.  And almost every sentence shared was detailed and grammatically correct!  Further, I was genuinely surprised (and delighted) by the variety of ways in which they arranged words and phrases.  Each sentence was unique and varied in vocabulary and word/part of speech order.

It was fun to laugh together, and this lesson ended our hectic week with a warm,"together" feeling. 

Two of my personal favorites were:

On the playground, Payton Manning awkwardly tackled the melancholy principal when the school bell rang.

Just past midnight, Lady GaGa suddenly kissed a joyful whale in the middle of the ocean.

Our pages had 20 choices, but I used a truncated version to shorten the post. I included a google.docs link, but it would probably be easier (and better) to create your own, using words that your students generate.. Nonetheless, here's the link.

I am sure that every BlogFriend that reads this post is a BUSY person with an endless To Do list. Enjoy the weekend. You've deserved it!

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