Hello, Sunshine! Grammatically correct sentences aren’t easy to master. With adjectives and tenses and nouns and more, it’s a wonder anyone ever learns the right way to craft a sentence. Help your child learn grammar the fun way with this engaging clothespin game!
Clothespin Game
What You Need:
Clothespins (at least 30)
Pencil
Paper
What You Do:
- Help your child separate all her clothespins into approximately eight different sections.
- On a sheet of paper, have her write down eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections.
- Let her describe what each part of speech is and give at least two examples. If she’s having trouble, help her out with hints.
- Now have her assign a pile of clothespins to each part of speech.
- For each pile, she should write down one example of that part of speech on each clothespin. For example, let’s say she has three clothespins in the adjective pile. She could write down the words stinky, pretty, and noisy on her clothespins.
- On a separate piece of paper, write a story about ten sentences long. The goofier the story, the better!
- Strategically erase a couple of words in each sentence.
- Now it’s time for the game: have your child use her clothespins to fill in the missing blanks of the story.
- Once she’s finished, let her read the story out loud.
- Carefully check to make sure the words she added work grammatically within each sentence. Explain why a misplaced word doesn’t belong.
- Can she find an even funnier and crazier version of that story by using different clothespins?
- This clothespin game doesn’t just have to be for one person. Invite over your child’s friends, make more clothespin words and find out who can make the best story!
