That time of year...

I am not huge on the idea of SLPs being responsible for teaching parts of speech...I think this grammatical content needs to be explicitly taught in the classroom, and has been deemphasized a bit, perhaps rightly, in favor of other things. However, they are abstract categories that our kids tend to struggle with, and we can assist in reviewing them during this high-stakes-testing time of year.

One new interactive, part of Sheppard Software's set of cool visual pages, is the Grammar Tutorial. This series of games emphasizes identifying nouns, verbs and adjectives, a common type of question at least on the MCAS. You also can create a character on a stage using a noun, verb, and adjective--here is my green cloud laughing.

BBC Schools also has some nice interactives for review. One is embedded below, and the link is here. I always like visiting their site to see the interesting dialectal variations and slightly off-color (according to American standards) educational content--one of the animations below has a boy falling down the stairs...



Language Lens:

• Lessons in parts of speech and traditional grammar build metalinguistic and writing skills, as well as abstract categorization abilities.