Teaching Parts of Speech with Sentence Buildings by Learning Resources

Grammar is a subject that many children find frustrating, but Sentence Buildings by Learning Resources makes learning sentence structures fun. With Sentence Buildings, you create sentence cities with nine buildings that teach parts of speech and you have over 300 double-sided cards that are color-coded to their appropriate buildings. The buildings are each labeled with noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, conjunction, article, preposition, adverb, and punctuation and are filled with their respective cards.

Quinn is in kindergarten, so some of these were a bit advanced for him (recommended for 1st grade and up), so we really only used noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and punctuation for his lessons with the buildings. Nonetheless, these turned the task of learning the English language into something fun and entertaining, not boring and drab. Avery, however, is old enough at 10 years old to learn all these, so we spent lots of time going over all the parts of speech together and he enjoyed making sentences by pulling out the cards and found some of our sentences to be quite hilarious.

As a mom and teacher myself, I think this product is amazing. Instead of children being bogged down with the boring stuff that comes with language arts, these turn it into a game, of sorts. And, like all Learning Resources products, these are geared to children with bright colors but are also made to last. With proper care, these will work for children for years and years.

You can purchase Sentence Buildings at many major educational supply and toy retailers nationwide, such as Amazon.com and Toys"R"Us, as well as on their website, www.learningresources.com. This set retails for approximately $29.99.

Thank you to Learning Resources for providing a complimentary product sample for us to base this review upon and for providing an additional product for our contest prize.


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Kindergartner-In-Training: Scrambled Sentences

One activity that Jake is actually very good at is "Scrambled Sentences." He finds this learning activity much easier than unscrambling words. The concept of this activity is pretty basic, but it does take some time to prepare for it.

To help me set up, I Googled parts of speech and found a site that listed out the most popular words from each part. Then I used the backs of outdated business cards to write as many words as I could to cover each part of speech. So I wrote one word on each card, making sure to use words that were fairly easy to read and to include names of people Jake knows and objects relevant to his world. You don't have to use business cards. You can use paper that is only printed on one side and cut them into squares or rectangles.

Here are some examples of sentences I have used for this activity . . .

So I would fish out the words that I need from my box of cards and then I would lay them out on the dining room table out of order for Jake. I always start by asking him to read each word to make sure he knows what each one says. Then I let him work on his own to reorder the words. When he thinks he has the sentence solved, I would ask him to read the sentence. This usually shows him any error he's made in the order. Sometimes it takes Jake one or two tries and sometimes it takes him five tries. It all depends if the particular sentence clicks for him right away or not.