My principal is big on data and he likes for us to give pretests, so I started my parts of speech unit with a diagnostic quiz that I recorded only to check progress, not for an actual grade. I had I do this in Excel as my grading program doesn't allow for such a scenario. The quiz revealed that more than half the class was unable to distinguish one part of speech from another. Guess it was time to reteach.
I hate spending time reteaching, and I feel like I'm just dragging the students through material they've already heard and don't want to retain! So I decided to try some less conventional ways to "review" the material. I called it a review, telling students I expected them to already know this information. We began by going over the parts of speech using Chris Biffle's Whole Brain Teaching method. You can see videos and read more about his methods at wholebrainteaching.com. I don't fully use his system, but I borrow from it regularly and the unit on the parts of speech is a good place to incorporate whole brain teaching. I made up gestures and one-line definitions for each part of speech to use. In some cases when I forgot to think ahead, I asked my honors class to make up gestures, and that was probably more effective for them anyway. I also borrowed some creative ideas for hands-on and kinesthetic activities from various places on the Internet, including Pinterest.
For prepositions, we hid a "treasure" in my classroom (actually a stuffed penguin) and then created treasure maps to guide someone else to find it. The maps had to incorporate at least 10 prepositional phrases. "Walk toward the window. Stand next to the bookshelf." If students couldn't do the task because they didn't know the prepositions, I didn't help them. I asked "What resource is there--besides me--that could help you?" After a few minutes, "Ummm. Could I look in the book at the list of prepositions?" Bingo! I'm always trying to get students to figure out ways to solve their own problems instead of expecting the teacher to do all the thinking.
To review adjectives (according to Chris Biffle, those words that make your writing "spicy"), I pre-made construction paper frames and put the words "I AM" in large letters at the top. Students had to page through magazines and cut out adjectives to describe themselves. As they worked I took each of their photos individually to put in the frame. (I borrowed the yearbook camera.) This activity afforded a lot of opportunities for those small one-on-one teachable moments ("Yes, you are a cheerleader, but is cheerleader a describing word or something else?"), which are probably more effective than me teaching all day long! Afterwards, I laminated their pictures and displayed them on the classroom wall.
My next task--how to tackle adverbs? Hmmm. Maybe I'll share it with you once I decide what to do.
