The School Potato: Nouns!

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Nouns!

I love grammar! Last week I focused on adjectives and this week I focused on nouns. To introduce nouns we watched a School House Rock video. Then the students did four noun stations: Noun Land Game (from The Teacher Wife), Super Hero Mad Lib (from The Teacher Wife), Picture Book Noun Hunt (free recording sheet from The Teacher Wife), and Describe Nouns. For Describe Nouns, the students took five or six noun cards and then took turns manipulating adjective cards to describe their nouns. You can get the noun cards for free from A Teeny Tiny Teacher. You could also have the students sort the cards into people, places, and things but I wanted to give the students an opportunity to apply describing words to nouns since we had learned about adjectives the previous week . The students seemed to enjoy the stations and got a kick out of their mad libs. We did the stations for two days since there is only 30 minutes for writing.

On the third day, the students were divided into four groups and each group received a piece of butcher paper with a category (people, places, things, and animals). Each group had four minutes to write as many nouns as they could according to their category. Students rotated the role of writer in their group. After the four minutes was up (I set a timer on the SMART Board), a designated messenger rotated the group's paper. This continued until each group had contributed to each category.

This is one of the four charts. I wrote one example on each paper. The students wrote in pencil but if you click the photo you may be able to read what they wrote more easily.

This cooperative learning activity was preparation for our next day's task...to create a Noun Town!! I have done a similar activity with other classes (Proper Noun Town and Symmetry City) so I was so excited for the students to create a Noun Town since it has been a successful project in the past. The students were so creative! AND I LOVED the sense of community that this activity brought to the classroom. Next week I am going to do a writer's workshop with the students with writing tasks based on our Noun Town. Students will have the option to write a news story (to inform) about Noun Town, a travel story about Noun Town (to persuade), or a story about Noun Town (to entertain). I have so many pictures to share of Noun Town because I LOVE it so much!! The students loved it too...they didn't want to stop but as you'll see below, our town doesn't have any more space for development.