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EMILY HOWELL
Uno! with words fosters understanding of language and story crafting
WHEN KICKING OFF my Grade 8’s school year with a parts of speech unit, I adapted a familiar game to help students review and solidify their learning. I found that a great resource for reviewing the material was a game called Parts Of Speech Uno. The game is played exactly like Uno! but instead of numbers, the cards have words. Students have to try to match the part of speech first before the colour.
I found the game online. It came with five parts of speech but also some blank cards, so I added the other three parts: interjections, prepositions and conjunctions.
Reviewing the parts of speech helped my students as they started creating their own Mad Libs (short fill-in-the-blank stories). We wrote a list of examples for each part so students could have a “cheat sheet.” (In the photos you can see they were definitely used!)
After using the game to review the term vocabulary, students began working on a project to write their own Mad Lib and remove the eight parts of speech in funny spots. Once completed, we were able to do some of the Mad Libs together!
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