Grammar is a fundamental part of early education, forming the bedrock for a robust set of academic and professional skills. Not only does it give children the tools to learn how to communicate effectively, but it also provides a jumping-off point for learning additional skills, such as picking up a second language.
Its importance cannot be understated in a world that relies increasingly on written communication. Have you ever read a CV or cover letter written with poor grammar and instantly found yourself questioning the quality of the application? Recent studies have underscored the importance of strong grammar in helping to create a professional workforce and have called for a change in the way in which it is taught.
Are you wondering how to teach sentence structure and introduce fun grammar activities into the classroom to give your students that competitive edge? Learning through play has been proven to have multiple benefits for children, and in this article, we’re going to look at some fun grammar games that will make your students look forward to every English lesson.
English grammar exercises, activities and games
In this section, we will explore how to teach sentence structure and punctuation through grammar and punctuation games. This is not an exhaustive list of grammar activities, but hopefully, the suggestions will help inspire your creative ideas.
Sentence snakes
This popular punctuation game helps children pick up the basics when it comes to punctuation, so it is a good starting point for fun grammar activities. Begin by writing a few simple sentences on your whiteboard or interactive display, but make sure you leave the full stops and capital letters out. Then, ask the class to copy the sentences out and place the full stops and capital letters where they think they should go – you can also ask volunteers to come to the front of the class and add them to the board. Once they’ve got the hang of this, you can introduce more complicated sentences that might require commas, question marks or exclamation marks. To make it even more fun, you can write your sentences in snake shapes – hence the game’s name!
Build a sentence card games
This is one of the most fun ways to teach grammar and sentence structure, and once you’ve created the materials, the number of different games you can use them for is almost limitless. All you’ll need is some paper, a few different coloured pens, and a pair of scissors. Start by cutting your paper up into small squares, roughly the size of playing cards. Now, all you’re going to do is write a different word on each card. Make sure you include a split of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and articles – and assign a different coloured pen to each category.
All that’s left to do now is choose the game. We can challenge our students to build a sentence featuring a word from each category by swapping cards with other players – or they can focus on a category and try to build a hand of five cards from that category to cement their understanding of the elements of language. Another option is to lay all of the cards face down and turn them into a memory game where students take turns to flip two cards at a time with the aim of making a pair from the same category.
With ActivInspire Activities, you can easily create a digital memory card- or word-matching game that you can reuse or add gradually over time.
BBC Bitesize grammar activities
Suppose you use an interactive display in your classroom. In that case, the English grammar exercises available on the BBC Bitesize webpages are ideal for getting your students to work together as a team. The Karate Cats game is a great introduction to grammar for younger learners. Still, we particularly like Crystal Explorers, which uses storytelling and puzzle-solving to teach more advanced grammar concepts.
Paint by words
This is a fun way to teach adjectives. Is there a book or story your class particularly enjoyed during their English lessons? If so, find some vivid character descriptions from the story, print off copies, and ask your students to underline all adjectives. Once they have successfully identified them all, get them to draw or paint the character. This approach combines visual and kinaesthetic learning, and you can, of course, also read the description aloud to your auditory learners.
Signs with bad punctuation
This is not a game but a fun way to teach grammar. It is effective because it contextualises the importance of grammar and the potential consequences of misusing it. There are probably few teachers who haven’t at some point enjoyed a BuzzFeed article of road signs or public notices that have used poor grammar to a misleading effect (the classic example being ‘Caution pedestrians slippery when wet’). There are plenty of catalogues of these online – compile a list and, for each one, ask your students to identify the mistake and offer an alternative solution. You can even get them to critique the social media bios of their favorite celebrities.
Apostrophe games
Learning to use apostrophes correctly can be one of the most challenging aspects of English grammar because (unlike most punctuation) they can have multiple uses. The punctuation games in this section will have your students differentiate between possessive apostrophes and contractions in no time.
Concertina contractions
This is a fun grammar activity and particularly effective if you have a lot of visual learners in your class, as it’s something they’ll remember. On horizontal paper strips, you’ll write out some simple clauses that can be contracted – for example, ‘We are’, ‘It would not’ and ‘They have’. Make sure you write each clause on a separate sheet of paper. You’ll then leave a substantial blank space, followed by the appropriate contraction – ‘re, n’t, ‘ve. Now, all you need to do is fold the paper in the proper places so that you create a concertina that allows the contraction to cover the appropriate part of the clause.
This is a great way to teach children which contractions are appropriate for each scenario and whereabouts within the clause where each contraction should sit. You can even get your students to draw fun pictures in the concertinaed gap, introducing an element of kinaesthetic learning that will help them to recall the information in future.
Pin the apostrophe on the noun
This apostrophe game is a play on a classic childhood party staple that won’t have health and safety administrators raising an eyebrow. Possessive apostrophes can be notoriously hard to understand, especially when we take into consideration plurals, multiple subjects or names ending in ‘s’.
This activity, though, is relatively simple. Draw some fair-sized apostrophes on paper and cut them out (you can even draw smiley faces on the apostrophes or make them into cartoon characters for bonus fun). Now, on some flipchart paper or even on an interactive display, you’ll need to write out several sentences that should contain an apostrophe, but make sure you leave the apostrophe out (e.g. ‘The boy stroked Agnes dog’, ‘The child dress is pretty’). Now, it’s time for the students to put the apostrophe where they think it should go, either using some sticky tack or holding it appropriately. It goes without saying that you do not need the blindfold for this version of the game!
If you’re using an interactive display, you can digitise the entire task by drawing the apostrophes on your digital screen and having students drag them to the appropriate place.
Planning your fun grammar activities
If you’re looking to plan your fun ways to teach grammar across a set of lessons, Explain Everything allows you to do everything, all in one place. It’s especially useful if you’re looking to bring together a variety of multimedia, such as browser-based games, videos, notes and diagrams.
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