Grammar Shelf

School will reopen next Tuesday :) and I've slowly been preparing my classroom for the new year. Today I reorganised the Grammar shelves. It took at least 6 hours and I have a few things left to do. I'm soo tired!!!

This is a picture of the grammar farm. The boxes in the front contain the word cards and the basket to the right holds the small objects for the farm. The children don't use all the objects at once, instead I encourage them to choose 6-8 noun cards and take the corresponding objects to a mat. Then they can take the parts of speech that we have studied and build sentences using the cards. As you can see everything is beautifully colour coded.
This shelf contains the box of grammar symbols [to the left], the grammar terminology cards, the grammar booklet and the grammar solids.

On this shelf I have 'Past and Present box', ' Infinitive Verb box', 'Article box' and 'The article game box'. The article game is an activity where the children choose either 'an' or 'a' to put before a noun. I also have a vase of three different flowers that are used for introducing adjective. To the right is the detective adjective game [which i will post about later].
The top shelf in the above picture isn't grammar! I thought I'd also share how I keep the classroom reading books. the little brown shelf unit is soooo handy and was about to be thrown away when someone thought I might find use for it. On the top I have placed the insets for design which my children use to make patterns. To the left I have a few series of phonetic reading books and a dictionary. To the right I have 8 stages of the Oxford Reading Tree books. I must say these are every child's favourites and have been a great investment! The small shelves in the middle contain the sight words boxes and a few grammar introduction boxes for the children to work with.

A new addition to the shelves are these grammar symbols practice cards. These are used to reinforce the symbols used for the different parts of speech. There are two different levels.

The first level has a sentence written on the front. The child reads the sentence and places the correct symbols above each word. . .

The the child flips over the card to see if s/he put the correct symbols. The child then writes the sentence in his/her grammar book and draws the symbols above.
The next cards have a string of symbols. The child takes a card and writes his/her own sentence using the symbols as a guide. I encourage the children to write the words in the correct colours.

There are other grammar activities but these are not ready on shelves. Instead the children have a list of materials that they should collect for the lesson. There is another grammar series which I haven't found the time to make yet.