Grammar Games

I’ve been waxing the more philosophical side of education lately (or about as philosophical I can get), so I thought I’d talk about website that I’ve discovered on another blog that works great as a compliment to English Language Arts teachers at the elementary and middle school level. No worries high school teachers, there’s plenty coming for you, with an interesting resource for science teachers that I posted to the forum yesterday about the movement of glaciers in Google Earth.

The website comes via the brand-new blog Bionic Teaching (it still has that new blog smell). I’ve long been a fan of the BBC School site, so it was great to see another teacher pointing out the helpful interactive activities it has on their ReviseWise site. Along with English activities, you can find Science and Math lessons as well. Online quizzes, fact sheets, and activities can be found for everything from data handling to electrical conductors. What I was particularly interested in was the adjectives and adverbs activity found in the Spelling & Grammar portion of the English section. Here at my school the students all work on enhancing their writing with the use of juicy adjectives; words that are supposed to give the sentence more flavor and make their descriptive writing better.

The online adjectives activity does exactly that, taking a simple sentence like, “The dog bit the man,” and leads the user through a process that not only adds adjectives to describe the dog and the man, but also plays with the idea that a description can change radically based on those adjectives. In the first part of the activity students must choose from a list of adjectives that make the dog sound huge and ferocious, while the man is tiny and weak. In the second part of the activity, the meaning of the sentence is completely changed by using adjectives that describe the dog as tiny and nervous, while the man is described as large and calm. There are plenty more activities and quizzes to be taken on ReviseWise, and it would serve as a great anchor activity throughout the day or bell work.

Thanks Jim and Tom for the great new blog, and the great new resources.