Tuesday 23 July 2013

Parts of Speech- Montessori

I Love Montessori method; I love using Montessori to teach my kids. That is why when i read up on Montessori's part of speech lesson, I just had to do it for Sonshine.
 
But I hesitated for a long time because, Sonshine was learning most of them through working on assessment books. In a sense, he already knows most, but not all, of them. I didn't want to bore him because Montessori recommends we teach each parts of the speech separately which means it involves multiple lessons. I didn't want to repeat what he already knows nor did i feel comfortable in skipping. So, in the end, I decided to tweak the lessons and combined them into one- tailored to his learning pace.
 
 
 
I made the word cards to describe each part of the speech for his reference (3 more cards are not pictured). Just a short explanation, each parts of speech is represented by a symbol. For a verb, it is represented by a big, red circle, a preposition a green crescent and so on.

 
First, I wrote a short phrase "The cat". We placed the grammar symbols after identifying which word is the article (small, blue triangle) and which is the noun (big black triangle).

 
I then explained to him we can expand the sentences using adjectives and that we use adjectives to give more description about the noun. In the above exercise, Sonshine & I brain storm on what adjectives we could use.

 
He chose to use 'horrid' as the adjective for this sentence. Again, i told him we could further expand the sentence with a verb. He chose to use 'pushing' and again, indicated the verb with the grammar symbol.

 
Again, we beef up the sentence using an adverb. This is where I briefly explained to him what an adverb is.
 
 
We did a few more sentence just to practise.
 
I enjoyed this activity alot. Yes me!
This takes away the boredom and technicalities of learning grammer.
 

5 comments:

  1. It's very visual to teach grammar this way. Erm, how do you remember each symbols when you teach sonshine?

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    1. Hahahaha! Good question! It IS very hard to remember which symbol is what. That's why the cards (1st picture) was useful. I use those cards as reference & also Sonshine can refer to them too. You can google 'Montessori grammar chart' & you will see a number of charts for easy reference. :D

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  2. This is very interesting. Are the kids supposed to remember which symbol stands for which part of speech? How does the symbol help them to construct a proper sentence? This seems very useful even for primary school kids. I'll need to find out and learn more about this method! :)

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    1. From what I read, it's suppose to help the child see the pattern in forming sentences. At first, I really didn't understand it but still went on to work on it with sonshine. While working on it with Sonshine, I discovered those symbols do work as visual aids; I really don't know to explain it but It beats those boring classroom lessons hands down! I don't know if the kids are expected to memorize the symbols but I think they are allowed to make reference.

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    2. The symbols make lots of sense especially when you tell the children the reason for having the particular symbol. E.g. Noun - It is black because it is probably the oldest part of speech. So black denotes coal, a fossil. Also the symbol shown here as a triangle, tells us that like a triangle noun is the most stable part of speech. The children love the link between the symbol and the part of speech

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