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.
It's very visual to teach grammar this way. Erm, how do you remember each symbols when you teach sonshine?
ReplyDeleteHahahaha! 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
DeleteThis 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! :)
ReplyDeleteFrom 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.
DeleteThe 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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