Angry Verbs

How do you motivate students to learn about parts of speech? Easy, play Angry Verbs, err…. Angry Birds. Start by teaching a quick lesson on verbs and then do things a little differently.

How this lesson looks different

·      Hook up your ipad to the smartboard.

·      Play Angry Birds. Describe what you see.

·      Have students identify verbs that you are using.

·      Now have students describe what they see.

·      Listen for the use of powerful verbs.

·      Students who use sentences with powerful verbs get 3 turns on Angry Birds

My students loved this lesson. The room was humming. Every single student volunteered at least one sentence. Every single student was able to generate sentences with powerful verbs. They played with their sentences and made them really descriptive, and they didn’t mind trying a few times to come up with a powerful verb.

Why did this work so well? First of all, this is just a great game to play. Secondly, since I used Angry Birds, the lesson had some great elements of game theory embedded within it.

Students had multiple activities for practice

-       They could choose their own level

-       Each time they suggested a sentence, they returned to the game

Students had a rich and stimulating visual environment for building language

-       The game moved through diverse settings

-       There were opportunities to use a variety of verbs

They had opportunities to learn from the game players around them

-       They heard many sentence models

-       They adapted strategies that other players were using

-       The activity was its own reward

After we practiced playing Angry Birds and creating descriptive sentences with powerful verbs, each student was asked to write 3 sentences. From these 3 sentences, each student chose his or her favourite. They wrote their favourite sentences on Angry Birds with sharpies and then coloured the birds. We created a display so that we could share our learning with everybody.

I think they look great. What do you think?

I’d like to say thank you to @saraallen who shared her own blog post about Angry Verbs.
http://pvroom121.blogspot.ca/2012/03/angry-verbs.html

Here is a link to some bulletin boards designs for Angry Birds.  Have fun!