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Monday, November 30, 2015

Farmer in the Dell - Sentence Patterning Board

Teaching parts of speech can get pretty boring and redundant after a while. So why not make it more fun?!
For every unit that I teach, I include a "Farmer in the Dell" sentence patterning chart. Farmer in the Dell is from GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition and Design.) These are charts that include separate columns for adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. The teacher and students combine words from the charts to make sentences and "sing" the sentences to the tune of Farmer in the Dell.
It's easy to make and it does wonders in teaching parts of speech in the present, future, and past tense and more! Try it!

As you can see from the photos above, once you write down the student responses, you can manipulate the prepositional phrase column by cutting it and placing it at the beginning of the chart. This allows students to see how a sentence can be written in different ways.

For the holidays, (or any holiday) you and your students can create a sentence patterning chart for any noun!
Topics, for example can be: Santa, elf, gift, tree, reindeer, candy cane, stocking, etc. Have fun with it! I'm sure your students will get a kick out or singing, "Huge and furry candy canes
Huge and furry candy canes
Huge and furry candy canes  
run across the yard!"
Then they can draw it! How cool is that?! :)

I can't wait to do it in the month of December. I'm sure Grammar time will be much more fun when their working in partners giggling over "Large and bumpy elves swimming in the beach." Ha!

For a free Farmer in the Dell template (Spanish & English) click