Nouns

I need to give credit where credit is due and this picture hails from "Schoolhouse Rock."  I loved listening to those educational ditties as a kid!  I received some educational ditties from my students today about nouns.  It's true that, "Kids say the darnedest things."

I asked my students in 6th grade English to give me a noun that described either something about their mood or being back in school.  I heard a variety of animals, everything from alligator to capybara.  Going down another row I heard some more nouns that entailed the likes of: bed, bike, pork patty, and lunch.  Don't hold the adjective in "pork patty" against my 6th grader.  Needless to say I got a good chuckle from the class in the morning.

I then tried a variation of the same exercise with my 5th graders.  I asked them to give me a noun that had to do with something from their summer.  Since I didn't think they would quite know what I was after I led with an example.  My first student led with a sentence.  "I went to see my grandma."  I said, "Grandma, that's your noun."  I had to work with the first 3 or 4 students and then by the time I got to my last student he/she had the hang of it.  I would have to say the 5th graders stuck to my topic a bit more than the 6th grade.

It was fun to hear their responses and to get them thinking a bit about nouns, a very important part of speech! 

Where would we be without them?