#34: Teaching Prepositions to Elementary Students “Bugs on a Log”
Podcast
About this episode
Welcome to back to 10 Minute Grammar...
This will be a little bit longer than my usual 10 minute episode, but the information is valuable to teaching elementary students prepositions.
In this episode, I am (once again!) excited to teach you how I teach! I’m especially excited because this episode involves teaching elementary students. Yay for the littles!
I love teaching how I teach elementary students because I really want to spread the message of hands-on learning, incrementally, slow introduction to difficult concepts, and application of each thing these littles learn. I love to do this for my young students.
I dig in right off the bat with some criteria that I have for teaching prepositions to these students:
• Fun
• Easy to succeed
• Repetitive
• Self practice
• Tricks…always tricks!
• Less about purpose than with olders (but still with purpose)
Always Teach Purpose Behind Everything You Teach—With Olders, the purposes for prepositions are many and easily understood when they have a good grasp of sentence structure:
• Subject is almost never in a prepositional phrase
o The girls, along with their brother, are coming to class.
o In between lunch and dinner at the school yard, we play for hours.
• Prepositional phrase openers
o During the last lengthy blackout, we used up all the candles.
• Using objective pronouns well o She gave the book to Jon and I. No! She gave the book to me. She gave the book to Jon and me.
o We had no idea it would get around to Cami, Kara, and I. No! We had no idea it would get around to me….so use me as object!
• Give more details
o Focus on this with elementary students
o Sentence building
Especially with Elementary and Middle Schoolers: Teach with images, mnemonics, rhymes, interactives, and check sentences
• Bugs on a Log
• Preposition Packets (Plane, Castle, Reindeer)
• Check sentence
o The plane flew _____ the clouds.
o The boy played _______ class. (time)
• Repetition
o Weekly Think Fast Quizzes Teaching Specific to Elementary Students
• Introduce as a part of sentences that give more information
• Focus on object too
• Interactives at first
• Verbal activities
• Sentence building It’s all here!
AND, I give you some pages from my most elementary preposition product:
Bugs on a Log. (Don’t worry…I explain how to make your own interactive/manipulative too!)
Note: This lesson came from Bugs on a Log, a downloadable book in my Teachers Pay Teachers store! Find everything you need here!
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