Jumpstart! Grammar

Games and activities for ages 6 - 14

Pie Corbett, Julia Strong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317294368
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Fully updated to help teachers deal with the new 2016 Grammar Tests, this second edition presents a collection of simple to use, multi-sensory games and activities that will jumpstart pupils' understanding of grammar in action

It includes coverage of the subjunctive and past progressive, selecting which tense is the most definite, identifying when a word is used as a subordinating conjunction/preposition, explaining how a comma can change meaning, and an increased emphasis on the passive. Jumpstart! Grammar will prepare children for any grammar tests on the horizon in an engaging way so that they love playing with words and spinning sentences to make ideas dance. And, of course, they will be able to name the parts if that is what is required.

Fun games will focus first on helping children hear the difference various types of grammar can make followed by activities to help them understand what different effects you can create with grammar. Technical terms will only be introduced once the children have established what the various features can do, with a particular focus on those terms that really help children discuss what makes language coherent and effective.

This indispensable, practical book celebrates the joys of language and coherent expression; of finding just the right words or phrases to express what you want to say.

Chapter 1
The things

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners

What are nouns?

Use these games to draw out from the children that a noun is a word that labels or ‘names’ something. Nouns name things, objects, people or places. You can put a, an or the in front of them – the storm, a surprise, the fear, an umbrella.

Most nouns can be either singular (only one) or plural (lots of them) – cloud, clouds.

You can have an adjective before them – the white clouds.

A collective noun is a word that refers to a group – shoal, herd.

Proper nouns begin with capital letters and name people, places, organisations and unique things – Bob, London, Macdonalds. Days of the week and months should also begin with a capital letter – Tuesday, March.

All other nouns are called common nouns.

Concrete nouns are nouns that name people, places and things that can be experienced through the five senses – car, rain, bird.

Abstract nouns name feelings, ideas and concepts – hate, anger, jealousy. A simple way to explain the difference between concrete and abstract nouns is to say that concrete nouns can be touched, like concrete whereas abstract nouns cannot be touched, like hunger.

I spy

Play ‘I spy’. Make it easy for very young children by suggesting that we only choose things that we can see. Vary this by inviting them to suggest things that you might see in different places, for example, a wildlife park, town centre, shopping mall, park. All the words they choose will be nouns.

Mime it

Someone is selected and comes to the front. This person has to mime something (a noun) and everyone else has one guess. It can help children if you give them categories like animals, things you find in a kitchen, eating something, something you find in the town, something in the countryside, etc.

The ‘does it fit?’ game

This game is quite a useful way of helping children get a feel for the grammatical properties of a noun. Provide the children with these two sentences:

The x is great.
The x were great.

Then provide a bag of words and the children have to try and work out which can be nouns, which are not, and which can be used as a noun and something else. A basic test to see if something is a noun is to see if it will fit into either of the above sentences. Let us take the word ‘green’, which at first glance might appear to be an adjective. However:

The green is great.

This works as a sentence. This means that green, which is often used as an adjective, can also be used as a noun when it refers to the village green or a golf course or a colour itself. Here are some other words to test out:

fish, group, huge, stole, cars, question, branch, Susie (careful with this one as you need to drop the – ‘Susie is great’), party, angry, hard, sun, laptop, potato, stars, shirt, shy, scissors, following, missing, bird, wave.

Text marking

Begin using the term noun when discussing reading and writing – use a colour to underline the nouns in a text and then another colour for the adjectives and another for the verbs. The basic tests for a noun are – can you have lots of them (singular/plural), can you put a/an or the in front of the word? Give children sentences or paragraphs so they can be ‘noun hunters’. Can they find the nouns?

Labelling

Everyone loves a Post-it note – and you can buy them in all sorts of colours, shapes and sizes. Play a simple labelling game, where Post-its are put on objects in the classroom and arrows are used to label objects in an image. The words are all called nouns. Nouns tell you the name of something.

Provide the children with a list of words on a board and get them to decide which are ‘Post-it’ words (nouns) and which are ones that tell us what something does (verbs):

cat, cup, jump, car, run, cow, walk, cap, tortoise, candle,
hop, book, pencil, cheese, policeman, swim, guitar, computer.

This is where grammar becomes tricky because you can never really tell what a word is until it is placed within a sentence. Most of us would say, at first glance, that run, jump, walk and hop are verbs. However, they can also be nouns – cricketers make a run; athletes might make a jump; most weekends we go for a walk; beer is made from hops!

I used a variation of the simple Post-it game with a Year 7 class several years ago. We wrote imaginative questions for the chosen objects and placed them around the room, leaving them there for future classes to look at and wonder:

Crack in the ceiling – are you a hiding place for spiders?
Light bulb – do you ever get tired of staring down at our whirring brains?
Dictionary – you have all the words but do you have any sense?
Door – you seem to be silent but do you really think that we have not heard your squealing?

Memory game

Everyone of a certain age remembers Bruce Forsyth helping winners in ‘The Generation Game’ trying to remember the items from the conveyor belt. Try your own version – playing the same memory game (known as ‘Kim’s game’). Place objects on a tray in front of children or use a collection of images on the interactive whiteboard (IWB). Give the class time to try and memorise the objects and then cover the tray or blank the screen. On their own, or in pairs, they can try and list the items on a whiteboard, draw them or just remember by memory.

Vary the game. For instance, you might select objects that are all one colour (red = adjective, a word that ‘tells us what something is like’) or for younger children use objects that all start with the same sound/letter.

Alphabet races

These races practise the alphabet and encourage children to generate ideas as well as reinforcing the nature of a noun. Create a simple grid for the children with the alphabet down the left-hand side. The children then have 5–10 minutes to complete as much as possible. The easiest categories are ‘girls’ names’ and ‘boys’ names’. Another fairly easy one is to list fruit and vegetables or food. You ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The things: nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners
• 2 The actions: verbs, adverbs, adverbials and prepositions
• 3 The links: conjunctions and connectives
• 4 Sentences: clauses, phrases and different types of sentences
• 5 Punctuation
• 6 Cohesion: including subject and object, formal and informal, active and passive
• Grammar glossary and index to grammar games