Grammar Talk Tuesdays: Nouns and Grammar Bootcamp!

That's IT!  It was time for some drastic measures in my class ... and so, Grammar Bootcamp was born!  In a recent conversation with my class, I expressed my frustration about their frequent forgetfulness regarding ending punctuation and capital letters.  It's not like they don't KNOW they need them, they are sometimes just ... well, lazy.  We talked about what we could do about it, and at their suggestion, we decided upon rewriting the "offending" sentence 10 times (before you think I'm too mean, or super old school, I want to again stress that this was their suggestion, and I would never "catch" one of my struggling writers without giving him or her a lot of assistance first).  I couldn't believe how pumped they were over this - they even asked if they could create posters to help them remember.  Well ... OKAY!  I decided to turn the poster-making into a contest - I told them we'd do a secret ballot vote when they were finished, and I'd turn the poster with the most votes into a real poster (LOVE me some Vistaprint!).

We finished our posters today and I put them up so we could vote.  I used my magnetic numbers to keep the anonymous aspect to it (I have my magnetic numbers available as a free download on google docs HERE.  Just print them out on magnetic paper and cut out).  We voted today as a class, but we're going to ask the rest of the students in the lunch room to help us out and vote tomorrow (the posters are up in the lunchroom right now). 

Some of the front-runners so far:

I can't wait to share our completed bulletin board with you!

We also added a second entry to our grammar journals over the week.  We looked at the different types of nouns, so we made a 6-flap shutterfold for them.  We had the names on the outside of the flaps, and the definitions and examples on the inside.  Quick and easy.

The left-side of the page has the definition of the concept, the learning goal in student-friendly language, the proof (just a quick worksheet about nouns) and the reflection (sorry I forgot to get pictures of the completed journals this week - for the reflection I asked them to write about what new information they learned, or what surprised them.

That's about it - we're moving on to pronouns next - should be an easy one as we've discussed it a lot in writing - especially when writing from 1st or 3rd person point of view.

Happy Tuesday!

Jen