My strong readers on Wednesday have been doing great work lately, and
impressed me with their discovery of past tense /ed/ ending
sounds...after they figured out what verbs were. We don't usually dwell
on grammatical terms, but we have reached the stage when we do need to
start differentiating/labelling things. The reader we have just read was
a good starting point. They had colour-coded the past tense /ed/
endings red/blue/purple, according to the pronunciation. This lot are
all verbs, we agreed. The current reader they are reading features
irregular past tenses for the first time...handy, we just got that page
in the textbook too - stroke of luck or what?!
Then we looked at 'things' eg rocket, computer...before trying to
figure out what 'red', 'big' etc were - and what they went before/added
detail to (erm, nouns?)
So we made three columns in
our notebooks, and then had a race to find 10 of each (nouns,
adjectives, and verbs - in the present tense ie transform the past tense back)
from the reader. Absolutely milking the material to death, by way of
speed reading, skimming, scanning, analysing, categorising - and
competitive too (I've got 7 adjectives!").With a young reader title like
this, you can be sure they'll get almost the same sets of words;
suggestion for a thicker book would be a point for every word that your
friends did
not write down, encouraging them to dig into the text for the juicy (new?) words.
After
all that heavy brain work (and aggressive writing!) we needed a game.
Silly Sentences seemed random (to them!) but they quickly got the idea -
categorising words again. The lovely thing about this game is that the
different parts of speech are colour coded, and jigsawed so that that
will only go in the right order. Kunpei found a pattern he liked and
stuck with it (photo). Takuro won, though, as he found the other
'secret' of success which was finding words that rhymed. Toru? He was
the real winner, as he decided he was only going to make sensible
sentences - smart lad!
