I used to love to sing along on Saturday mornings to all those great tunes, some of which I still remember by heart. So, as I was thinking about spending the first couple weeks this year reviewing the parts of speech, I thought why not throw in some Grammar Rock! I knew I didn't have a lot of time to devote to this, and I wanted to make it as fun as I could to spark their enthusiasm.
After listening to Grammar Rock songs over and over and over (my son was wondering what the heck I was doing as I sang along to Interjections!) last weekend I came up with a plan. My idea was to spend one class period (or less) on each of the parts of speech featured by Schoolhouse Rock: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, and pronouns.
I would introduce the lesson with the song and provide students with a note-taking sheet to fill in while we watched the video on YouTube. We generally had to listen to the song a couple times to get the notes, and then we went over them as a class to make sure everyone had the right answers. Then, of course, we had to watch it one more time just for fun and to sing along! So, I passed out the lyrics and we did our best! After that, we would create a class anchor chart as a reference tool for students. These are some of our finished charts.
After we did the anchor charts, students would do some kind of activity to practice using the part of speech. To go along with "Unpack Your Adjectives", students drew a picture of somewhere they went over the summer and then filled their suitcase with adjectives to describe that place.
In another activity, students cut out different verbs and then fit them into a graphic organizer.
After completing the activity, students were given a worksheet to complete independently to show what they had learned.
Each time I started workshop out with the Grammar Rock song I would have several students go, "Yessss!", so I knew they were enjoying it. My hope is that as we talk about our writing and practice our word work throughout the year, this grammar unit will pay off. If you would like to try this Grammar Rock unit, you can find it at my TPT store!
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