Lesson One:
Lesson Title: Action Verbs
Time: 30 minutes
Goal: Student (Kindergarten) will be able to identify action verbs.
Objectives: Student will be able explain what an action verb is and pick them out.
Materials:
- Action verb YouTube video
- Action verb charades cards that I made
Instructional Procedures:
- Ask the student if she knows what an action verb is.
- I know she knows what a noun is because they have been learning it in her class.
- I will draw on her prior knowledge of nouns and explain that a verb is an action that the noun can do.
- Next I will play the action verb video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jwYTZdUVi0
- I will then review and say that an action verb is something that you can do.
10 minutes
- I will then take out the action verb cards that I made with pictures on them
- The student will look at the picture say the verb and we will act it out
20 minutes
- For the last 10 minutes of the lesson I will assess what the student has learned I will do this by asking them 10 questions
- I will ask them “Can you _______”
- Walk
- Book
- Smile
- Dance
- Shoe
- Scream
- Lid
- Chicken
- Smell
- Water
- Her responses will let me know if she understands what an action verb is and assess what she has learned from this lesson.
30 minutes
Lesson Two:
Lesson Title: Writing Sentences with action verbs
Time: 30 minutes
Goal: Student (Kindergarten) will be able to write sentences using different action verbs.
Objectives: Get student to write sentences using action verbs and be able to pick out the verb.
Materials:
- Sheet of paper with different pictures similar to the pictures used in the charades game.
Instructional Activities
- Review what an action verb is
- Give different examples of “can you _____” (walk, smell, swim)
5 minutes
- Show examples of different sentences that I made. Read them out loud to her and have her highlight the verbs with yellow crayon.
15 minutes
- Show the worksheet that I made with different pictures showing different action verbs.
- She will tell me what action verb is shown in each picture
- She will then write sentences using the action verbs shown in the pictures.
- She will highlight the action verbs with her yellow crayon.
- This will be used as the assessment
25 minutes
- During the last couple of minutes I will have her tell me what she has learned about actions verbs. I will then have her act out one more action verb of her choice as a fun last review.
30 minutes
When I started to brainstorm about topics that I could create lessons on, I had a difficult time. I was trying to think of an academic topic that I could teach to one of my peers. However, I felt like any lesson that I created they would have already know a little bit about. Therefore, I turned to my neighbor who I sometimes babysit. She is a kindergarten student who is pretty advanced for her age. She goes to a Montessori school and sometimes spends half of the days with the first grade students. I got in contact with her mom and she told me that in her class they have been learning about different parts of speech. They just finished learning about nouns and within the next couple of weeks they would be learning about action verbs. I decided to introduce her to action verbs.
For the first lesson I decided that I wanted to build on her prior knowledge of what a noun is and relate this to action verbs. I want this information to hopefully end up in her long-term memory. For this to happen “Information must be elaborated upon and connected to information already in the LTM” (Dembo & Seli, 2012, p.85). The information that is already in her long-term memory is nouns. Therefore, I want to show the relationship with nouns and action verbs because she already has information on nouns. We reviewed that a noun can be a person, place, or thing. I asked her to make a sentence up. She said, “I learned about addition today in school.” I then asked her to tell me the noun and the action verb in the sentence. She could tell me the noun but not the action verb. I told her that I was going to teach her what action verbs were. We watched the YouTube video, which had a fun beat to it and she was singing it by the end of the video. After the video, I said “so in the sentence you told me earlier, what did you do” and she told me that she learned. She was beginning to understand that an action verb is something the noun can do. I then took the charade cards I made and told her to act out what she saw and tell me the verb or read the verb on the card and act it out. Some cards had pictures of action verbs and some had the action verb itself. Some of the actions verbs on the cards were walk, jump, smile, dance, etc. We both acted them out. She is very active and loves to play so I tried to take this into account when making my lesson. She even wanted to expand the card game I had to where she had to guess what I was acting out or I had to guess what she was acting out. Katrina Schwartz quoted Mari Montessori and explains that “Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas” (Schwartz, 2015). Since action verbs are something you can do I thought this was a perfect opportunity to practice an active hands on learning strategy. I also know since she is in Kindergarten she has a lot of energy and getting her up and moving will be better for her then sitting down the entire time. The next part of the lesson is where I try to assess what she has learned and if she can distinguish action verbs from words that are not action verbs. I planned on getting her active and moving around before this so I could have her full concentration for the assessment. CNN explains “a quick burst of aerobic exercise relieves stress and improves concentration by flooding the brain with oxygen and activating brain chemicals such as dopamine” (2008). She answered all of the “can you _____” questions correctly which let me know that she understood what an action verb is.
I created my second lesson to build on her new knowledge of what an action verb is. I wanted her to be able to create her own sentences using action verbs and be able to pick action verbs out of a sentence. I started off with a review again of what she knows action verbs are and how to pick them out of sentences. We went through a couple of sentences together that I typed up and picked out the verbs together and she highlighted them with yellow crayon. I then showed her a worksheet that I made with four different pictures on it showing different action verbs. I told her to look at the pictures and tell me what the action verb is shown in each picture. The verbs were dance, run, jump, and sit. Then I asked her to write four different sentences using the action verbs in the pictures and highlight the verb in yellow. I used this as her assessment to see if she could correctly use and identify the verb in a sentence. She wrote four sentences using the verbs that made sense and correctly identified the action verb in each sentence. She asked if she could draw a picture of one of her sentences and I allowed her to do this. For this lesson I used a rehearsal strategy, where we repeated highlighting the verbs in each sentence over and over to retain it (Dembo & Seli, 2012, p. 90). I also had her elaborate on this concept by creating her own sentences. To bring the lesson to a close I asked her to tell me what she has learned about action verbs and to pick one out and act it out for me one last time and let me guess what it is.
I taught both of these lessons at the kitchen table. Oregon State University explains, “Choosing a quality study environment, decreasing any internal or external distractions, and limiting your multitasking can help make your study time productive and effective” (2016). I chose the kitchen table because it is the only room without a TV or her toys. I knew that if I tried to teach this in her room she would get distracted by her toys and want me to play with her. Therefore, I used the strategy of finding a distraction free area for the most productive and effective learning.
Overall I feel like my lessons went fairly well. She is a very bright young girl and enjoys learning, which made it easier for me. I asked her what she liked and disliked about the lesson. She told me that she liked the action verb cards and drawing the picture of the sentences. She was very positive and nice about the lesson. I think there are a couple of things that could have gone better. For example, I think I could have challenged her a little bit more because she grasped the concepts very quickly but I do feel like she knows what action verbs are now.
References:
Dembo, M.H. & Seli, H. (2012). Motivation and learning strategies for college success: A focus on self-regulated learning. Routledge. New York and London.
Fuzzy brain? Improve your attention span. (2008). CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/11/14/rs.increase.your.attention.span/
Concentration & Distractions. (2016). Oregon State University Academic Success Center. Retrieved from http://success.oregonstate.edu/learning-corner/learning-college/concentration-distractions
Schwartz, Katrina. (2015). Why kids need to move, touch and experience to learn. KQED. Retrieved from http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/26/why-kids-need-to-move-touch-and-experience-to-learn/