One can never have too much fun with grammar. Those of you who survived that Friday morning activity of ‘Parse this paragraph’as a student, will understand my determination (as a teacher) to breath life and fun into grammar. The hoop activity can be used for ANYTHING. Start with a quality text. My choice was ‘Bear has a story to tell’ by Philip C. Stead. After reading this delightful little story I chose to focus on descriptions of WHERE and WHEN.
If you are following this blog you can use this activity to build on the vocabulary and understandings established with Sentence Dice. The hoops I am currently using are sold as ‘desktop sorting circles’ because they can be collapsed and I would look really silly on a bus with full sized coloured plastic hoops carried across my person. Any coloured hoop will do.
Now to the important part. I went through the book and wrote adverbials of time and place onto strips of card. I made labels WHEN and WHERE. This book gave me beautiful lines such as ‘under a blanket of fallen leaves’ and ‘when spring arrived’. Seated in a circle with the class I read a strip at a time and then gave it to a student and asked whether it told me where something happened or when something happened. I asked where it should be placed and why they thought that. The discussion was lively and engaging and you could hear the students’ vocabulary expanding.
Once you’ve sorted like this, the sky is the limit. Just think of all the grammar you can investigate (while having fun and still talking about fabulous literature).
This activity was undertaken last week by Ash and Alex in their classroom and dramatically improved the quality of student writing (in a single lesson).
I was given a set of “sorting hoops”. I had no idea how to use them. I put them on the schoolroom shelf and got on with “boring school stuff” according to my 5 year old. Then one day we were asked to sort…mmm…sorting hoops anyone. Well my five year old now loves sight words…he gets to throw bean bags at them in sorting hoops. He has to say the word then throw the bag. For an active five year old getting up and throwing at words is pretty cool. Another day he had to sort books….the texts were a variety of books he knew and had had read to him, books about things he knows about, books he did not know but would like……I guessed, and non-fiction. He had to sort them into YES, NO and HELP piles. YES, I know and can read, or know what they are about, HELP I have not read or know about but want to have read and learn about and NO…I am not interested in the book. I was amazed at how much effort he put into the task. He likes sorting…so he went through each text…20 in total and looked at them all in detail. Only two texts went into the NO sorting hoop, they were work journals of mine and my husband…just wanted to check he did the task properly.
He likes to be the schoolroom clown and yet sorting hoops really sort him out. He loves them and he seems to feel he is doing something…not just sitting at his desk. I love the sorting hoops…now everyone in the schoolroom wants to use them.