Word Banks

photo by revbean

Word banks are a fun way to teach or reinforce grammar without requiring your younger child to write. They consist of index cards, each listing a single word that you will eventually construct into sentences.

Here’s a topic suggestion The Homeschool Classroom received recently:

“teaching ‘writing’ (grammar, creating sentences, paragraphs, stories) to a boy WITHOUT requiring him to handwrite anything – for many boys, handwriting comes late.”

I think this is true not only for boys, but many young children. Learning to properly write their letters can be stressful, and giving your student a break from handwriting while learning language arts is possible.

Here’s how we reinforce our grammar lessons in less than ten minutes:
1. Introduce and define the part of speech you’ll be addressing that day. We did nouns first, because that is what we were learning in our Language lessons book. Stick with one part of speech per lesson. We did nothing but nouns the first few times.

2. Give many examples from right where you are. If you’re in your living room, learning about nouns, you can point out couch, table, sister, etc. If you’re covering adjectives that day, then ask “How would you describe the couch?” I usually write several words on our board as Soleil points them out.

3. Assign your student to write out the cards. If your child abhors handwriting time, and you want them to dictate to you, you could make ten or more cards in a sitting. If you’d like your child to practice their writing skills, you can have them copy between five and ten words from the board onto the cards. If you have an advanced reader, she can write the cards out on her own, asking for spelling help when needed. You may want to color coordinate your cards by part of speech for later. I chose not to, so I could also use them to quiz her on the parts of speech.

Putting Sentences Together

Over time, you will collect several cards. Once you have enough parts of speech to construct sentences, you can begin to do so. There’s a couple ways you can do this.

Have your child construct sentences on their own.

Divide the cards according to the parts of speech and play a game where each person draws a random card from the right category to make interesting sentences. For instance, first you would draw an article, then an adjective, then noun, a verb, a preposition, another noun. You might wind up with a sentence like: The blue elephant danced on the chair.

Construct a sentence incorrectly and have your child fix it.

Take turns constructing sentences and add them together to make a story.

Do you have any fun ideas for teaching grammar?

Angela can be found writing at Homegrown Mom.

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