Parts of Speech Grammar Game

It’s a major holiday weekend over here, and we are having a blast playing a Parts of Speech Grammar Game. Holidays are a great time to take a break and play with family, but of course, there’s always a way to throw a bit of learning in there with all of the fun. We’re stuck at home for the morning, waiting for a delivery, and so board games are on the agenda.

One of my favorite board games is Scrabble. It is excellent at teaching spelling, increasing vocabulary, and even a bit of math. That’s right. You have to multiply and add up all of those double and triple word scores. 😉 Today I decided to throw a bit of a twist into our traditional Scrabble game. We could only create adjective words. Talk about awesome grammar practice – my daughter, heading into second grade, wasn’t exactly clear on what words were adjectives, but over the course of one game, she really started to pick it up. It was a great review for the upper elementary girls as well.

It was fun to watch as the game progressed that the girls all had nouns in their mind as they were creating their adjectives. They were almost building stories and describing people as they read across the board. At one point the first grader said, “Mom. I know who this is,” as if we had set up the tiles to create the personality of a person.

My favorite games can be altered to teach a variety of different topics, and of course Scrabble completely fits that bill. Just pick a part of speech, and let the grammar fun begin. Now that we’ve had a taste of the awesomeness, I think we’ll work on verbs and adverbs next, but nouns are always a lot of fun too. Since we’re taking a small sidetrack from actual Scrabble rules, you can break it up even further by separating common and proper nouns. There is so much potential here to fit years of grammar lessons into an hour long board game.

This parts of speech grammar game idea could easily pass onto the classroom as well. It would fit beautifully into a literacy center, and could work for a large variety of age groups as the words become larger and more complex. Give it a try, and you’ll be hooked.