Possessive Practice

While my kiddos have been traveling around the world, learning about our different continents (I'll leave that for my next post when I have pics!), we're also learning about possessive nouns.

I started with good ol' Annie Scrambler and the "everything I want I just add 's ("apostrophe s") to my name and its mine!"

That always goes over big.  If you'd like to check out the video clip, head over to my grammar wiki page on possessive s {here}.  There are also some links to games and some other clips.

Throw in a little Moby and BrainPop, and the kids are getting it a little more.

Show them my sample of my "I Want" page (piece of copy paper folded into fourths with "Mrs. Youel's ______" and pictures) and they are ALL over that!

one of my student's from last year

 

My students were owning roller coasters, amusement parks, 4-wheelers, etc.  They had a blast and it was a good way to practice.

Cue the next day.  The difference between plurals and possessives.  Not too bad.  I used my favorite book, The Greedy Apostrophe, and we discussed the difference between plurals, possessives, and contractions.


Still good.  Well, that is until day 3.  Singular possessives versus Plural Possessives.  LOT of confusion.  The next day to reinforce it, I pulled out the sticky notes (cool idea I got off of Pinterest).  This way, they were able to manipulate the apostrophe and s whether we were talking one or two.


Getting better.

Handed them a sheet that my grade had copied for practice.  *wince*

My lovelies struggle with learning.  Orally, they are sooooo on it.  Give them a center, they're okay after practicing.  Give them a written activity, and its not too pretty. :(

Soooo...I decided after looking at what my grade level had copied and recycled a few that I knew would be more headache than learning difficult, (reading level too hard, directions too difficult, etc) this weekend I decided to start from scratch.  I mean, who knows your class better than you, right?

I'm pretty proud of what I came up with.

Complete with word bank.  I LOVE word banks.  There is one plural possessive in each one of the 3 sheets (circus, space, sports themes).  Click on the pics to take you to TpT to check it out closer.

Also, I'm planning on introducing my "Pirates vs. Zombies" this week as well.  I imagine my boys will be all over it! :)

Also my "Rounding Up Possessives." (I have no idea why the pic is so small or blurry!)

 

To see what I did with last year's group (and for a little more pictorial help with my descriptions), check out {this post} about possessive nouns.  Hope you can use these to help your kiddos! :)


 

Possessive Nouns

This is a hard concept to teach.  I've been spending most of my morning looking through my resources and well, pinning, pinning, pinning! :)  

Not that I got sidetracked by other things...nope, that never happens (and I didn't create two or three new boards to go with some of the things I've found!).

After writing down all my ideas from last year and the new ones I found this year on sticky notes, I finally sat down and voila!  New unit!  (My husband keeps asking me why if I teach the same concepts each year, why I have to reinvent the wheel - I usually just give him "that look" and he backs off!).

So, I've already noticed that others were also looking for refreshing new ideas since my email has been flooded with "so and so pinned this" which means I must've found some good things!

How did we plan before Pinterest??????

The one thing I started noticing though was that a lot of great activities deal with the phrases - but not the whole sentence that you would find possessives included. Also, several things reminded that yes, my students sometimes DO mix up adding "s" to plurals and adding "apostrophe s" to possessives.  Yours too?

So, with that in mind, and knowing I've had this super cute Zombie clipart just sitting in my folder - voila!

May I present Pirates vs. Zombies!

Yep, I figure pirates travel in groups, zombies are loners....and my boys are gonna eat this up! :)

Students sort sentence cards into whether they are singular (zombies) or plurals (pirates), and use a recording sheet to write the underlined phrase correctly.  Also included are an answer key and links to my wiki grammar page, pinterest page, and back here to the ol' blog.  

If you are in need of a little zombie/pirate rivalry, please click on the picture to take you to Teachers Pay Teachers or click {here} for Teacher's Notebook! 

Ouch - just thought of a bad pun for the zombies, about giving them a hand....guess I'll spare you that one! :)