5 Strategies to Make Kids an English Grammar Enthusiast

The Grammar Pieces for ELA Mastery are the Parts of Speech

For both young and veteran English language learners, English grammar can be difficult. Ultimately, kids may struggle to even recognize the parts of speech in basic phrases. In spite of the fact that their letters are identical, the first underlined word below is an adjective and the second is a noun.

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He played on the boys’ basketball team.
The boys played on the basketball team.

It makes sense why children frequently fear learning grammar! However, giving pupils enjoyable assistance at home in solving the English grammar puzzle might reduce their irritation and, ideally, motivate them to study more about it.

Tips 1: Learning Nouns

• Nouns are people places, things, or ideas. A fun activity to teach or reinforce this part of speech is to use index cards to write nouns onfor items and even family members in your home! Place the index cards, with words like couch, bedroom, Dad, and ball at their locations around your home (and tape them to your family members and pets who are proper nouns ), labeling the nouns that they represent. You can even have your child make some of his or her own index cards. Place new cards around your home as your child masters the old ones. To teach nouns that are ideas, you can include them in your conversations about values, such as honesty, courage, and perseverance.

Tips 2: Learning Adjectives

• Adjectives are words that describe or modify nouns. Children can learn these by making silly sentences that include as many adjectives as possible to describe a noun. Using a large whiteboard or poster paper, have your child practice making silly sentences like this: Start with a simple sentence idea- The girl was _______ because ______.

  Then make a silly sentence like this-

  The tall, happy, smiling girl soon was grumpy because her delicious strawberry and chocolate ice cream cone tumbled to the cold, hard floor.

  Soon your child will come up with his or her own ideas for making silly sentences!

Tips 3: Learning Verbs

• Verbs are action words and “state of being” (helping) words. We will focus on an action-verb activity here. Kids typically learn these easily because kids love the action! You can play a pantomime game in which your child chooses an action verb to silently demonstrate, like singing, running, sleeping, thinking, and sneaking for you to guess. Take turns or set a timer for even more challenge!

Tips 4: Learning Adverbs

• Similar to adjectives, adverbs are words that describe or modify another word, only this time they modify verbs, not nouns. Students can remember what an adverb is because it is added to a verb (ad + verb = adverb). Level up your verb pantomime game for this part of speech by having game participants guess the adverbs being demonstrated along with the verbs. So, when your child pantomimes sleeping, he can act sleeping out lazily or restlessly or comfortably. Adding a timer for this one, too, makes learning grammar even more fun!

Tips 5: Learning Prepositions

• Prepositions show the relation to or location of a noun in a sentence. There are 150 of them in the English language! Some examples of prepositions include behind, atop, above, and underneath.  You can play the “Drive By Prepositions Game” anytime you are on the road. Give your child a preposition to explain with any scene he or she sees along the way, like A bird sitting atop the stop sign.
  A parking lot is behind the school.
  A cat is sitting underneath the tree.

Practice with activities like these will give your child the understanding and confidence he or she needs to solve the grammar puzzle!

More strategies to inspire children to enjoy grammar for the pronoun, conjunction, and interjection elements of speech will be available soon!

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