Play the Bag Game: Learn Parts of Speech

What You Need:

• 25 Flashcards
• Pencil
• 8 small brown paper bags

What You Do:

1. Review 8 common parts of speech with your kids.
   • Noun: Often described as a person, place or thing. For example: dog, flower, girl, boy, mountain, rock.
   • Verb: an action or a state of being. Examples: run, swim, jump, think, laugh, cry.
   • Adjective: a word that modifies a noun. It will describe a person, place or thing. Examples: small, heavy, red, orange, smart, kind, loyal, angry.
   • Adverb: modifies a verb. Sometimes they end in the letters “ly.” It can also refer to where or when something happened. Examples: quickly, forcefully, steadily, often, rarely.
   • Pronoun: represents a noun. Examples: he, she, her, him, it, they, them.
   • Preposition: describes information about phrases in a sentence, such as how words relate to each other. Examples: across, above, in, from, underneath, onto, on, behind.
   • Conjunction: connects two phrases together. If the phrases are independent, they should be separated by a comma after the conjunction. Examples: and, but, yet, so, or.
   • Interjection: used to express emotion or excitement. and they are usually followed by exclamation marks. Examples: Gosh, Phew, Wow, Yikes, Aha.
2. Write the name of one of the 8 parts of speech on every paper bag.
3. Have your kids write down 25 different words, one on each flashcard. Encourage them to think of a variety of words.
4. Help your kids identify the part of speech belonging to each word and placing it in its corresponding paper bag.
5. Choose one word from each paper bag, and ask your kids to use the words to form a sentence. They will receive one point for each word they used correctly in the sentence.
6. Play until you have used up all of the flashcards. Count up the points that each player has received to determine the winner. If the verb needs to be conjugated to make a sentence work, or you need to include articles like “the”, help your kids incorporate them into the sentences. You can start with simpler sentences only containing a noun and verb if you want to work up to the longer sentences.
7. When you have used all the flashcards, place them back into the correct bag and then play again.