Over the Christmas holidays my kids had a go at the Christmas Alphabet Challenge page and they both really enjoyed the challenge of finding words for every letter of the alphabet. While I was on the website downloading the page I spotted the Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns and Adjectives Alphabet Challenge pages. I thought these might be a relaxed way of revising these parts of speech with my oldest. We have not covered this with my youngest yet.
My oldest began by selecting the Adverb page and started thinking of possible adverbs. But she got a bit stuck. Then we thought it might be helpful to first think of some verbs and afterwards think of adverbs to describe the verbs.
Writing out a list of verbs
This is now my preferred way of using these pages. If the kids start with the verb page it helps them when they get stuck thinking of possible adverbs. For example: How did the boy jump, or how did he write ? Likewise it helps to do the Noun page and then the Adjective page afterwards.
Some of the verbs we chose
My daughter also thought it was better to attach the pages to a clipboard so she could walk around the house to find inspiration for each of the letters of the alphabet.
It ended up being a great revision activity and also an excellent spelling activity. When she did not know how to spell a few of the words that she thought of, she had to use her dictionary.
My youngest spotted his older sister walking around with house with a clipboard writing words and naturally asked if he could try. So I gave him a Noun page and we had a quick chat about what nouns are. While we were chatting I realised that he already had a fairly good understanding of what nouns and verbs are because he always listens to his sister's learning activities.
His Noun page ended up being an animal page, but those are the words that he can spell.
Writing his list of animals
With my youngest, we linked the Noun and Verb pages together. After we had a good selection of nouns on his page (he did not manage to think of Nouns for every letter of the alphabet but he has informed me that he is keeping his noun page so he can add to the page as he thinks of more nouns) I suggested he could think of actions that his different nouns would do. So a rabbit hops and a duck waddles – and there he had two verbs for his verb page. He really liked this idea and I must admit got a bit creative with what actions his animals could do. Let's just say I think some of the animals on his Noun page are magical animals who can chat, draw and paint!
Hint – with younger kids it can also help to suggest that they look in some of their favourite books for words (and of course this also helps with spelling).
Using books to help find words for the Alphabet Challenge activities
We love the idea of the alphabet challenge pages as they always get the kids thinking, writing and practising their spelling and the Verb, Nouns, Adverb and Adjective pages really do provide a great revision or “teaching” activity.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
