(This is part of the Slice of Life project)

This morning, I spent a good hour going through about half of the culmination projects that my sixth graders finished last week around Parts of Speech. I often complain that the abstractness of dissecting a sentence down to its parts has very little value to a young writer, so I won’t rant again. In this project, my students have to color-code the eight main Parts of Speech in their own writing (over the course of at least 10 sentences), so my hope is that it has a bit more meaning for them.

I added another component this year — a tally sheet — that seems to have made a positive difference for this project. The sheet forced them to think about the words they were using and helped them track the work they were doing, according to the project requirements (ie, nouns are colored blue, verbs are colored red, adjectives are colored yellow, etc). A big plus: the tally sheet has made my job in correcting the project a whole lot easier. I move back and forth, between the project and the tally sheet. So far, I am about halfway through the 75 projects and most are doing a pretty good job. We do a lot of games and activities in the classroom around Parts of Speech (such as Bingo and tossing a Nerf Brainball around the room to demonstrate prepositions, etc.) and that helps with many of them.

The toughest Part of Speech? Adverbs. No doubt about it. Adverbs are the trickiest, by far. They are slippery parts of speech, moving from one job to another, and that ‘ol “-ly” rule works only sometimes, but not always.

Now, I just need to get through about 40 more of the projects. Sigh.

Peace (in living color),

Kevin