Learning grammar rules can be boring for young children. Make learning about language fun with these word games and activities.

Learning about language and grammar doesn’t have to mean endlessly reciting grammar rules. Encourage children to approach learning about language with enthusiasm by using word games and language activities that entertain as well as educate.

Nouns

Nouns are parts of speech commonly referring to a person, place, thing, state or quality. They include:

• concrete nouns (pencil, horse)
• abstract nouns (hatred, love)
• proper nouns (William, Sydney Opera House)
• countable nouns (pebble, coin)
• common nouns (table, book)

Adjectives

Adjectives are descriptive terms that modify the meaning of a noun. For example: brown dog, large building, tall tree.

Verbs

A part of speech that denotes existence, action or occurrence, verbs are more simply explained as “doing words”. Examples: the verb to be, rise, jump, have, carry, sing, run, lift.

Adverbs

A part of speech that modifies the meaning of a verb, adjective or other adverb. For example easily, very and happily in the sentence: They could easily envy the very happily married couple.

Identifying Parts of Speech

Play this categories game. Draw up a table with five different categories at the top. These could include boys’ names, food, actions, famous cities, country names, colours, animals or a variety of other subjects. One player selects a letter of the alphabet and all players must find an item for each column starting with that letter. A table with four columns headed noun, verb, adjective and adverb would allow students to demonstrate their understanding of which words fall into each category.

Take a block of text or series of unrelated sentences and remove all nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, replacing them with a blank line and a bracket with the type of word that has been removed like this:

The brown cat sat on the mat becomes The ......... (adjective) ............. (noun).................. (verb) on the ...................(noun).

Without revealing the sentence/story, read through the list of parts of speech required, getting students to make a suggestion for each one (yellow, television, jump, hotdog). Once all blank spaces have been filled in, read out the nonsense sentences (The yellow television jumped on the hotdog).

Using Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs and Adverbs

Have students write a description of themselves. They must include enough details to enable someone to pick them out from a group based on the description. For a classroom group, read out each description and ask students to guess who the subject is.

Give students a simple line drawing, such as a square, crenellation (the pattern of a castle battlement) or simple house (square house, triangle roof, rectangle door). They must write a procedure for someone to follow to reproduce the drawing exactly. This will involve giving approximate measurements and positions of various details. Alternatively, this can be a simple verbal exercise where they give spoken instructions to a partner rather than writing them down.

Ask students to write a description of a simple daily task, such as brushing their teeth or making a phone call. Instructions are to be given in enough detail so that someone with no knowledge of the process or objects involved would be able to adequately complete the task (suggesting that they are writing their instructions for an alien seems to convey this most easily).

English grammar can be extremely complicated and each of these parts of speech has a variety of obscure and/or complicated uses. For younger students the initial challenge is to help them differentiate between these four parts of speech with commonly used words and phrases.

Related articles: Antonym, Synonym, Homonym, Acronym

Reference: Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary (2004)

Collins Australian Internet-linked Dictionary (2004)