Down on the Farm!

With the barn!This enticing material is used with Primary children who are independently reading to experience the function of words in both phrases and sentences.  It includes work with:

• nouns
• articles
• adjectives
• conjunctions
• prepositions
• verbs

The Farm games are playful and engaging for the children as they are both mentally and physically experiencing these parts of speech with their reading and writing.The auditory games of "fetching" initially focus on adjectives and nouns.  We begin by highlighting the adjective and incorporating the noun and article, both of which were previously introduced with different sets of materials.  For example, after the child retrieves a horse of his or her choosing from The Farm, the Directress might say, "Oh, but I was thinking of..." (and then writes a more specific clue on a slip of paper).  The child reads the clue, and the Directress responds, "Black ...oh, yes! The black horse.  That is the horse I was thinking of!"  The child returns the original horse to the stable and comes back with a black one.Verbs are introduced through fetching as well. The students choose a cow, pig, horse, etc. based on what's written on a slip of paper.   The children are then asked (in writing) to fetch a "clap" or a "run" or a "leap" and quickly smirk as they realize these words are "unfetchable" because they are actions- they are verbs!The grammar box of symbols is used in conjunction with The Farm to represent the function of each word. For example, the large black triangle sits above the noun, the most important, most stable part of the sentence.  The smaller triangles modify that noun with royal blue triangles for the adjectives and light blue triangles for the articles.The farm is later used as follow up work for the conjunction and preposition after their respective separate presentations with other materials. Then, they can use The Farm and symbolize as they recreate a phrase such as:

The small pig next to the black horse and the colorful rooster

The full use of the materials really kicks in around the age of 5 with full sentences!(A thank you to Mrs. Robyn Milos for providing examples for The Farm)