Grammar Punk...

I am posting this for future memory and also for a friend from Weber State University. It is a grammar game that my cooperating teacher at Weber High School taught me

Grammar Punk

Okay, I hope I can explain this in enough detail. If not, you can adapt it to what works for you. You will need six dice. However, if you don’t want to make all the dice you can have students just give you something that fits the category. I usually have my students work in pairs with this game; it makes it easier for them.

Dice:

•Consonants

•Vowels

•Numbers 1-6

•8 parts of speech (verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, conjunctions, interjection, prepositions)

•Punctuation (period, question mark, comma, semicolon, colon, parenthesis)

•Category/topic

How to play:

•A student rolls the consonant die and another student rolls the vowel die. Students are to create a list of ten words using the consonant and vowel rolled. The words must be four letters or longer.

•Students must come up and show you their words. The first person to get ten words with four or more letters, which also contain the consonant and vowel rolled, gets two points.

•Next, have a student roll a number, part of speech, punctuation, and category. I usually write it up on the board in a code form and tell the students that this code must be on their paper so I know what type of sentence they were supposed to have.

o Code Example: RE 3 Adj. ? Animals

o Consonant: R, vowel: E (they must underline their words), number: 3, part of speech: adjective (they must circle the part of speech), punctuation: question, category: animal.

•Now, students race to be the first team to write a sentence. Here is what they need to do for the sentence. Using my example from above.

o Sentence must use three of the RE words from your list, it must contain an adjective, the sentence must be a question, and it must be about animals.

•Once students have a sentence they bring the paper to you. You check to see that they used three of their words, it’s a question about animals, and they have an adjective in the sentence. Example:

•Okay, so let me walk you through a full example and hopefully it makes sense.

•Students roll the following consonant and vowel: C and E; they are now going to write a list of ten words using those two letters.

1.Cream

2.Creature

3.Center

4.Caroline

5.Charade

6.Epic

7.Electronic

8.Eric

9.Encyclopedia

10.Advice

•Students will bring the list to you to look over. Words must be spelled correctly to count. If they are not I tell them they have two (or whatever it is) misspelled and they need to fix them before coming back up. Keep checking papers until you have a winner with all ten words.

•Next, students roll the following: 2 verb ? sports

•They need to write a sentence that uses two of their words from the list, includes a verb, is a question, and is about sports.

•So, my sentence might look something like this.

o Caroline, do you play center or forward for the school team?

 The first team to get a sentence that meets the criteria gets five points. I play for four or five rounds then call it good. They team at the end of the round with the most points gets a few extra credit points or a treat.

 Students much turn in the paper with the team names on it for credit.

I hope this all makes sense. It really is easy and fun to do with the kids. I don’t know if they only like it because they get to roll dice or what, but they have a good time. They also like to race to the front of the room and try to win the points. Let me know if you don’t understand my instructions, sometimes what makes sense to me doesn’t to others. Also, you don’t have to have them worry about punctuation if that wasn’t your focus this term. My students focused on the eight parts of speech, so that is all I looked at. I wanted to make sure they used them correctly.

Samantha