Is it just me or are homeschool grammar lessons dull for you too? My boys hate grammar. If you’ve read my blog at all you’ll see I’m a Grammar Offender. It has been a challenge creating hands-on language arts lessons to engage my kids. But it beats the alternative … boring workbooks circling nouns and underlining verbs.
To change up their stale homeschool grammar lessons I try to toss in one tactile grammar activity during the week.
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For the Adjective Challenge the focus is on building at least four adjectives using Bananagram tiles for every noun note card. (Scrabble tiles work just the same but the texture of Bananagrams is smoother and easier to store). I come up with nouns while I’m waiting on the boy to turn over all those tiles. In effort to make it a bit easier I do separate the letters into vowel and consonant piles. Have younger students work on that!
I put the card down and he reads it. I start to ask questions.
What color dog do you see?
Is it a big dog or a little dog?
Is it a nice dog or a mean dog?
Then I let him grab the tiles and build the four descriptive words. I do not correct spelling until he is finished! I have learned that if I stop a child in the middle of his work to correct him … I deflate his efforts and he doesn’t want to try out of fear of failing. Let the words go misspelled until all four words surround the noun. Then read them out helping with spelling.
If we have time he can arrange the words into sentence form pointing where the commas should go. We add other words on note cards to build real sentences if we have a ton of time.
I wanted my boys to see the colorful descriptive words surround the noun. This was great for my visual learner.
The boy seems to like it and it’s a day out of his language arts workbook! It’s also one less thing for me to “grade”.
You can check out an old video we made working on adjectives by using clothes pins and note cards! I no longer have the big bag of clothes pins so we’re enjoying the letter tiles.