"I Can Own Anything I Want!"

Okay, with a little help from Annie Scrambler on "The Electric Company," it was one of the ways I introduced possessive nouns to my students!



I will have to say, over the years, this hasn't been my favorite topic to teach during grammar, but it's a definite necessity.

This year, I introduced it to students as being a way to show that something belongs to them. We started with reading "The Greedy Apostrophe" (if you have not read this book, you HAVE to get it! It's hysterical!)

It talks about how the apostrophe enjoys making plural nouns instead of possessives....something we all know the kids definitely get confused! I even made a cute center focused on the book that's available free at my TpT store here.

So, I stayed on the egocentric topic of my students showing what THEY own! We made an anchor chart where students, with adding an apostrophe and a "s", could own anything they want! Boy, did they want a lot of things! Money, banks, football stadiums, unicorns, etc.

We then continued the week with the "egocentric" theme by folding a paper into fourths and drawing/writing other things we wanted.


Finally, students were able to demonstrate their understanding by using macaroni as "3D apostrophes". To make sure they understood it was to show that any noun owned something, we did a quick check with some old worksheets I had that I turned into posters (LOVE our poster maker!). THEY GOT IT! Yep, I did a happy dance. THEY EVEN GOT THE PLURAL POSSESSIVE FORM!!!!!! That's not even one of our standards, but I pushed it in there anyway, just to see! :)

So, I'm feeling pretty accomplished with this! We take an assessment next week on using apostrophes with possession and contractions....here's hoping it sticks with them! Oh, I also threw in a little Moby and Brain Pop Jr. in with it as well....I swear, I feel like I can hit almost every topic between Brain Pop Jr. and The Electric Company!!!!

Hope this helps anyone out there struggling with this concept....and yes, I had the "duh" moment (hand slapping the forehead) asking myself why I hadn't tried this approach before! :)