Teach: Grammar Games

I have been struggling with my transition into teach 4th grade writing, pretty much since the beginning of school. But the past few days and the upcoming days have been great! I wanted to share a few of my fun "games" we enjoyed while learning grammar.

Capital Letters:
It is a whole standard, but I have really having a hard time with the idea that it was something that I needed to teach again in 4th grade. I did spend a day on it, and a homework assignment. However, in looking for ways to make it a little more interesting I landed on this easy idea.

I had 6 sentences on the board and the students had the same six, plus more for homework in front of them. All of the students stood up to start with. As I called on a student they told me one word in the sentence that needed a capital letter. I then called on another student, and they had to say why that word needed a capital letter. Both students could then sit down. I continued until everyone had a turn, and they even got to go twice each. It seems really silly, but they did enjoy it. As we went they also highlighted the letter that needed to be capitalized. When we finished they had to rewrite the sentences correctly, and they also had more like that for homework. It worked out great and the grades were pretty good.

Ending Punctuation:
Again, this was a whole standard, and I was struggling with the idea of needing to spend a lot of time on it. So we played another "game". I read several sentences out loud to the students and they had an action to show what type of punctuation the sentence needed. If it need a period they clapped their hands, a question mark they jumped, and an exclamation point they held up spirit fingers. This literally took less than 10 minutes, but we all enjoyed it. My assistant principal stuck her head into the room for 30 seconds to tell me something, and when I met with her later she asked what we were doing because it looked like we were having so much fun. We were!

Commas (and maybe Quotation Marks):
This one is a little tricky, I mean I still have trouble with using commas correctly, but I wanted to again make this something fun. I wrote several sentences on a piece of poster board without commas. After we discussed the rules for the days lesson students identified where the commas needed to go in the sentence. They then taped/glued an elbow macaroni noodle in place for the comma. That night they had a matching homework assignment, just no noodles this time.

It will also work great for teaching quotations, but I haven't decided if I'm going to use the same thing twice.

I kept the posters around my classroom for weeks, and then finally got tired of looking at them and threw them away. Not thinking about I had not taken pictures.