What's a part of speech?

Understanding the parts of speech was a challenge for my second graders. They really struggled with identifying whether a word was a noun, adjective, or a verb. In order to help them, I developed a game to review this topic.  The game is very simple but, as all educators know, if you hype something up and act enthusiastically, the students become engaged and ready to learn. 

To begin, I reviewed the parts of speech with my students and placed flashcards with noun, verb, and adjective written on them at the top of the table. Next, I laid out flashcards in front of my students. Each flashcard had either a verb, adjective, or noun written on it. Each student was given a turn to roll a dice onto the flashcards. Once the dice landed on a card, the student had to read the word written on the card and identify as a noun, verb, or adjective. 

See! Very simple!  

I prepared a lot of flashcards for this game so that it would last for the entire 30 minutes of our tutoring session.  

The list below includes all the words I used for this game: 

• Verbs - run, scratch, jump, walk, scream, sleep, skip, flip, hop, dance, sing, laugh, draw, 
• Adjectives - cold, young, old, new, hard, one, soft, blue, sweet, green, sour, red, hot 
• Nouns - dogs, cats, children, brother, markers, friend, fingers, pencil, men, teacher, he, she, it, I, you, boxes, key, babies, computer, characters, monkey, buses, woman, we, they us, them 

In addition to this game, I found a great Smart Board game at arcademicskillbuilders.com that helps students review the parts of speech. Check out the game at this link.