Review the cases of nouns: nominative, objective and possessive with students in this activity. Then, place students in small groups and play an identification game where the students find subjects, objects and possessive nouns.
Noun Case Identification:
Almost all students can tell what a basic noun is. It is a person, place or thing. However, most are not sure about the case of a noun. The case of the noun tells how it will be used in a phrase or a clause. There are three cases: a word that is a subject is the nominative case, a word that is an object is the objective case and a word that is possessive is the possessive case. The University of Ottawa website gives further detail if needed.
Once students understand the differences between the cases, begin the identification game.
Materials Needed: Post-Its and large easel paper or newsprint.
Preparation:
Depending on the size of the class, the teacher will need to prepare a large easel paper for each group. On each paper write these sentences:
1. Fluffy meowed, chased a mouse and then found the dog’s toy.
2. Bobby kicked the ball in Mr. Wilson’s yard.
3. Mother made cookies in Grandma’s new oven.
4. Lonnie took the football and ran to Grant’s house.
5. Jennifer gave Jodi a present.
Directions for Game:
Step 1 -- Divide students into groups or teams of three or four students. It is best if a leader is elected to help the group make quick decisions.
Step 2 – Give each group an easel paper with the five sentences and a stack of Post-Its.
Step 3 -- The team will need to identify each underlined noun as object, subject or possessive with Post-Its. All teams have 60 seconds.
Step 4 – When the 60 seconds is up, the teacher can turn over the sheets that are correct. The teams that have the papers facing up have 60 more seconds to re-arrange the Post-Its to get them all correct.
Step 5 – Do this in 60-second increments until all teams have the sentences correctly identified. The teams that had the nouns labeled correctly can make up five new sentences for other teams to identify using the first set as a model.
For fun, the team that completes the task first can win candy and/or help the teacher tell the other teams if they have any wrong each time they complete the task.
This post is part of the series: Parts of Speech Lessons
This series of lessons will offer tips and ideas on how to teach and how to review the eight parts of speech.
