Learning About Verbs!

Hey there!  It's Sarah from Permanently Primary.  :)  I feel like I don't know what school is anymore.  For realz.  We didn't have school last Tuesday or Thursday and then we had a 2-hour delay on Friday!  Between snow and the cold, I was cooped up in my house with my 2 sweet boys for an extended Christmas break of sorts.  ;)  Therefore, I feel like I didn't get much accomplished at all!!!  I had all these plans on what to share with you, but they just didn't come to complete fruition.  :/  Bummer.

BUT, I will share a couple things we did and some resources that I used that you might find helpful!

I just started teaching my sweet firsties about verbs.  I love to create an anchor chart to start a unit so that we can all dig in and put our stamp on it.  It's so much more meaningful when everyone can participate and contribute!  So we made this little anchor chart to hang in our room as we talked about the definition of a verb.  I started the first one and then others started to contribute.  My higher students were the first to raise their hands with ideas, but within 2 minutes everyone caught on and could accurately name a verb.  Such a quick assessment!

Also, it takes me a long time to draw and I have to look at an image to be able to do it, so sometimes I just use clipart and print it real big to stick on my anchor charts!  ;)  The saying, "A verb, a verb, you do it, do it, do it!" comes from The Phonics Dance.  I've gone to several workshops and she has an awesome grammar component!  The kids love it and they REMEMBER a verb, purely from the chant.

I also llllloooooovvvveeee children's literature, so I always try to incorporate it any opportunity I get.  These two books are perfect for introducing verbs to little students!  You can purchase them both on Amazon.  You can click on the pictures and it should take you straight to it on Amazon.  :)

I also came up with a simple little differentiated activity for the students to practice identifying verbs.  For my lower students, I wrote really basic verbs on notecards.  I grouped them together and they had to read the words on the card and DO them.  I wanted them to act them out so that they could understand the concept of a verb being something you can actually do.  I wrote the words in different colors so that I could remember which group got which set.

For my middle group, I wrote different verbs that required a little more thinking about how to actually do them.  They weren't as simple as moving an arm or a leg.  They were things they had to think about what it really looks like to "do" those things or that might have more than one way to do it.

For my high group, I wrote nouns and verbs so that they had to distinguish the part of speech of the word.  They were encouraged to try to act it out if they weren't sure.

Finally, to wrap up the lesson I showed this:

Classic.  :)

I'm pretty sure we will have another snow day tomorrow, but I'm going to try to go to bed now just in case.  ;)  See you all next month!