Mini Lesson Plan: The Verb Jungle
Verbs are crucial to creating sentences. A sentence simply cannot be complete without a verb! Today, we learn to master these powerful verbs!
Activity 1: Twinkle Trails Episode 19 — The Verb Jungle
Prompting Questions
- Name something you are. (Person, friend, preschooler, sister, son, and any other state of being)
- In the following pictures, can you tell me what each person is doing?
Acceptable answers include any action word.
Suggested answers:
Top left — swimming, splashing
Top right — eating, biting
Bottom left — swinging, playing
Bottom right — shouting, scolding
Every word you’ve just suggested to describe what’s going on in each picture is likely a VERB. What’s a verb? I’ll let Miss Twinkle answer that…
The video taught us that there are two types of verbs: action verbs and linking verbs that tells us about the subject.
Action verbs: what the subject is doing, has done, or will do
Present: Brian runs.
Past: Brain ate.
Future: Brain will speak.
Linking verbs: shows a relationship between the subject and a noun/adjective
This flower is pretty.
You seem tired.
I am happy.
Sometimes linking verbs can be tricky to identify. For example, the word ‘tastes’ is a different type of verb in each of the following sentences.
Action Verb: She tastes the fruit.
Linking Verb: This fruit tastes funny.
Here’s a handy tip to identify linking verbs:
“To check if these are being used as linking verbs, try replacing them with the correct form of to be. If they make sense and have almost the same meaning, they are linking verbs.”
Source: English Grammar 101Let’s take “This fruit tastes funny,” as an example for this method. To check whether ‘tastes’ is an action verb or a linking verb, we can switch ‘tastes’ with the verb ‘is’ and see if it makes sense. “This fruit is funny” does make sense. Thus, we can conclude that ‘tastes’ in this sentence is a linking verb.
In this sentence, the verb ‘tastes’ is linking the subject ‘fruit’ to the adjective ‘funny’.
Mini Game: Sort these precious treasures into the correct treasure box!
Cut out the sentences into fun shapes and get your children to sort them into the correct treasure chests! (You can make your very own treasure chests out of cardboard boxes and a few creative embellishments.)
Activity 2: Learning Through Action
Simon Says
You’re probably familiar with this classic classroom time-filler, but we’ll link you to a brief explanation.
Besides being absolute fun, this game could bolster your understanding of verbs! To spice up this game, throw in nouns and adjectives. For example, when “Simon says bread” or “Simon says wet” is called out, the children shouldn’t react because ‘bread’ and ‘wet’ aren’t verbs!
Charades
Having the kids bring action verbs to life by acting them out will be great educational fun!
Download these printables here and here for good charades ideas!
Activity 3: Pop Quiz
Let’s put your new verb knowledge to the test through engaging worksheets!
Highlight/circle/underline the verb in each sentence. Download this worksheet here.
Check out a few of our favourite verb worksheets by other preschool bloggers:
Activity 4: Story Circle
Form a circle with your students and create a story by taking turns to add a sentence to progress the story. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how ridiculously funny this game can get!
Simply:
- Introduce a character. For example, the story will start with: There once was a girl named Cat.
- The next person in the circle will continue the story by adding a sentence, e.g. Cat had pointy ears. She has to clearly state the verb used, which in this case is ‘had’.
- Have fun and continue until you decide to end the story!
Hope this lesson plan helped you learn a thing or two about one of the most crucial parts that make up a sentence! If you’re curious to learn more about what makes up good sentences, check out our Mini Lesson Plan series on grammar!
SOURCES
English Grammar 101
PHOTOS
LittleLives Inc.
Pixabay
English Current
