The Grammar Garden an Invitation to Learn

“The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination.” –Maria Montessori from To Educate the Human Potential

These words came to mind when I realized a change was in order for our Montessori grammar work. We have been using a traditional(ish) grammar farm for the past couple of months. Wanting to spark excitement with our language practice, I ordered a number of small Playmobil sets with various themes.

To celebrate Spring, we set up a grammar garden.

The girls helped me think of good nouns, verbs and adjectives that relate to growing flowers. We added them to our plastic bins we’re using for the work.

I made homemade play dough for this work (which we ultimately store in an air-tight container in the fridge). It smells like tea tree and coconut oil. Between that and the rosemary sprigs from our yard, this activity became a fun sensory exploration.

The shelf set up / invitation:

The girls worked together swapping off building sentences, coming up with ideas for more parts of speech labels, and labeling all the Playmobil parts with strips of paper baring nouns with ultimately creating a garden to act out the parts of speech.

Together we chose a sentence to illustrate. Then I wrote it for them in cursive — ever since we introduced conjunctions our phrases have gotten really long.

By this point, they’d already been at grammar work for a couple hours, and I could sense me suggesting handwriting practice would be a no-go; above all this was a grammar lesson and not cursive writing practice. They were ready to color!

Together we used grammar stencils to code the parts of speech with the symbols, and the girls illustrated their phrases.

I think we all loved this work a lot.

     

Clean up time. The girls managed this entirely themselves which was lovely. Because the majority of the materials aren’t new, they know where they belong on the shelves (finally). Mike put the play dough in the containers and into the fridge for me. 🙂

All in all, I know the play dough and miniatures make this hands-on work strikingly appealing, and I will be very surprised if the kids don’t revisit grammar pretty frequently over the next few weeks.

How’s that for a Montessori-inspired invitation to learn?