We're still hacking through the parts of speech in my class. We've finished nouns, verbs, adverbs, and we're almost through adjectives. I spend about 10 minutes a day reviewing parts of speech (part of our word work). I always try to mix things up for my students. I'm lucky enough to have only 20 students this year, but of these 20, 15 are boys, 5 have I.E.P.s (with another 2 on waiting lists to be tested), and 6 have behaviour issues (and that's on a good day) - whew!. Needless to say, I HAVE to mix things up, keep things structured, yet fun, and engage them in hands-on activities as much as possible. For each part of speech we co-create anchor charts (I "borrowed" this idea for adjectives from a chart I saw on pinterest, but my students think they came up with it themselves). For their independent Word Work, I'm using the book Hot Fudge Monday - they LOVE the funny activities, and I LOVE that they actually WANT to complete the work. We also use the SMARTboard a lot so they can circle and highlight the various words on the board - and sometimes I even let them use the magic pen. ;) They also really enjoyed the poster activity we did on "Life is a Verb" (see last post). I'll have to tie something like this into each unit - it would be great to have real student created posters for each of the parts of speech. But I've got a surprise for them tomorrow. They LOVE using my Comprehension Cootie Catchers for pair share activities after their independent reading. And I mean LOVE - I've never seen a bunch of boys so excited about using cootie catchers. So, I made a Cootie Catcher Parts of Speech package for them. This activity contains a cootie catcher for common nouns, proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. I'll pair up two students, each with a different cootie catcher, and they can take turns identifying the correct words. I may even turn it into a little game WITH a timer going on the SMARTboard. Watch out, boys .... I told you learning can be FUN! I just posted this activity to my TPT store. Click on the picture above to preview the activity. And ... for a little extra fun, I'll send a FREE copy to the first two people to leave me a comment (with their email address) telling me their favourite way to review parts of speech. Happy Wednesday!