How to Teach the Parts of Speech

The parts of speech are the essential building blocks to teaching students good grammar. Understanding the parts of speech and how they fit together makes writing and reading make sense. Building Language Arts skills on the eight parts of speech can be a fun learning experience if taught creatively and with enthusiasm.

Begin with nouns. A noun is a person, place, thing or idea. Get students to list as many nouns as they can. Put them in categories on an overhead or white board as they say them.

Take the list of nouns students come up with (stop them before there are too many), and start asking for words that describe each one. List those in front of each word. These are adjectives. An adjective is a word that describes a noun.

Ask students to look at each noun adjective pair and give it something to do. Example: Big dogs bark. Explain that this action word is a verb.

List how the words do things. Example: Big dogs bark loudly. Tell students that how something does the action is an adverb. An adverb describes a verb, adjective or other adverb.

Make another sentence to go with your first group. Ex: Look at the big dogs. They bark loudly. Explain to students that "they" in the second sentence refers to "big dogs" in the first. "They" takes the place of the noun "dogs" and is a pronoun.

Add these words to the second sentence: around the neighborhood. "Around" is a preposition that implies a relationship. Where to they bark? Around the neighborhood.

Identify or add the two final parts of speech, the conjunction and the interjection. "Look at the big and little dogs. Wow! They bark loudly around the neighborhood." The conjunction joins words, phrases and clauses and the interjection displays emotion and is usually followed by an exclamation point.