Gretchen,
 
Thank you for your great grammar ideas! Earlier in the summer you mentioned getting ready for this class. One of the things that caught my eye (I saved your posting) was something called Sentence Part Art, an activity from Harry Noden. Could you explain how you are doing this? I am going to be getting into sentence structure soon and thought I might try your idea. I would like to share an "artsy" parts of speech activity that I have tried before in exchange. When I teach possessive nouns, I have the students come up rhyming phrases like "boy's toys" or "boys' toys". They make posters of their phrase using a word document and clip art. The pictures accompanying their phrase are dependent on where they place the apostrophe. Hope this was helpful! Thanks in advance!
 
Paulette
----- Original Message -----
From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">Gretchen Lee
To: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 2:53 PM
Subject: Silly, rewarding grammar period

Hi,
 
I'm sure this is of no interest to the college folks, but I had to write.  I am teaching a class for middle school grammar-phobes this trimester.  We are having so much fun!  We have been looking at nouns - these are kids who could not pick out a noun reliably, and some are in eighth grade.
 
We played noun bingo today. I gave them a blank bingo card and they got to fill in any nouns they wanted to use. Listening to the incredible analyses that went on was so rewarding. They have finally figured out that one noun can be classified several different ways, and they spent ten minutes trying to figure out the most "juicy" nouns - nouns that fit in the most classifications.
 
Was "Metallica" anything other than a proper noun and a collective noun? Could it be concrete because you could touch the band?  Was it countable?  What about "rage"?  A child could have rages - did pluralizing it make it concrete? Was that like tantrums?  If you used "John's," did it count for both proper and possessive?  And, "Hey, Mrs. Le, he used it for plural, even though it had an apostrophe!!"  The best part was when things were ambiguous, and suddenly their cases for a given classification had just as much justification as mine ("Mrs. Le, is "sky" concrete?  There's really no such thing, ya know.  We just learned about the stratosphere last year, and there's really no such thing as sky. I want to use it as abstract; it's really more of an idea!"  Etc.)
 
All this for four Teddy Grahams.
 
These kids are having so much fun, and suddenly they "get" it.  My biggest grammar-phobe from last year begged me to let the class look at pronouns next, because he remembered that there were lots of "classes" and he thinks he'll get them now.
 
So much of this is mind set.  Because it's an elective that they chose to take, their attitudes are so different.  We'll see if it holds up, but so far no sign of the frustration I saw last year.
 
On to Parts-of-Speech Go Fish!  Does anyone have any possessive pronouns?
 
~Gretchen



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