Perk Up Your Homeschooling with Fun Words to Teach Grammar

Having the ability to read is invaluable in everyone’s life, so emphasizing reading while homeschooling your children will make a lifelong difference in everything they do. In fact, reading was so important to me while homeschooling our children I devised a large number of ways to teach them and make it fun. Here’s one of the things I did that I believe will help your kids to enjoy it, too.

The purpose was to teach the kids word structure, but it needed to be a game of sorts so they’d enjoy doing it without even realizing they were learning the principles I’d set for them. So, once the kids were in bed for the night, I prepared a sentence structure game that I introduced to them the following morning.

I used various colored poster boards to help keep their attention, and cut them into 3 inch strips. Then I’d cut the strips into different lengths from 3 inches to ten inches to make “cards”. Next I’d write a different word on each card using the smaller lengths for shorter words like “I” and “me” and longer lengths for longer words like “refrigerator” or “language”.

However, I wanted the words to make correct sentences when they were arranged in proper order on the floor or table. So, I included all kinds of nouns (store, house, dog, chair, etc.), verbs (going, sitting, cooking, etc.) helping verbs (will be, was asking, etc.), adjectives (red, soft, lazy, etc.), and adverbs (quietly, patiently, etc.). I also included each of the kids’ names and synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms just to make things interesting.

After breakfast the next morning, I brought the cards out and placed them in a large stack on the floor. The instructions to the kids were to make a proper sentence and lay whatever words they wanted to use in the correct order on the floor. They were to make only one sentence and they were to work as a team. I would then check the sentence for correctness and we would discuss it together before starting all over with a new sentence.

I knew they’d have fun but I had no idea how much fun! I sat to the side and watched as they worked together to make their simple sentence blossom. “I saw the dog” became, “The dog bit the turkey leg hard.” Then they arranged the words to say, “The hard turkey bit the dog in the tail.”

Of course there were smirks and giggles and I saw their eyes twinkle as they thought of silly sentences and then developed them into hilarious sentences; things like, “The baby howled outside while the dog did his math in school,” and “Johnny kissed the tree when the blue car swam by.”

Using this fun learning technique, I was able to teach grammar and sentence structure, things that were usually boring and often difficult to understand, through a unique method that all of us thoroughly enjoyed.


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