Turn $5 Sentences Into $15 Sentences With This Parts of Speech Menu

A few weeks ago, one of my students walked into my middle school resource room with an assignment, and it became clear the second he walked in that he was very frustrated.

He plopped down in the seat across from me and said, "My teacher told me to write about a memory. I did, but she said it needs more. I don’t get it!”

When an ELA teacher is trying to help students write more descriptively, but a student with print or reading disabilities is simply trying to survive another writing assignment, there’s bound to be tension. I completely understand both perspectives, and I love being the person who can bridge that gap!

He wasn’t wrong. He followed the directions. However, what he'd written was extremely short and to the point. What his ELA teacher wanted, though, was detail.

I explained to him that we needed to focus on imagery - on writing about the things he thought, saw, smelled, tasted, or heard in that moment, because it makes it more interesting for the reader. I told him that to accomplish this, we needed to add adjectives and adverbs to help his memory come to life on the page.

I wrote the sentence "She saw a beautiful blue butterfly" down on a piece of paper, underlined the adjectives, and drew arrows from the adjectives to the noun they modified. The visuals jogged his memory and helped him understand what we needed to do, and we got through, but not without a little more struggle. That's because, to students, identifying the adjectives and adverbs in an existing sentence is a completely different ballgame than pulling them out of their own minds to enhance their own writing. This is especially true for students with print/reading disabilities.

I kept thinking about our conversation later that day because it's a recurring one with many of my students. I thought to myself, "It sure would be cool to have a resource at the ready to help show my students the parts of speech they need to use rather than tell them. I'd love to have real, concrete examples that I could put right in front of them to jog their memories and help spark ideas - something fun to use."

And that is how my Parts of Speech Menu came to be!

How to Use the Parts of Speech Menu

With my parts of speech menu, students can see examples of each of the eight parts of speech. The menu doesn't have definitions (because they already have those and have heard them a million times). The menu's purpose is to show, not tell, and provide a jog to their memories and some inspiration!

Students can keep it at their desks to use as a reference any time, or you can distribute it for writing activities as needed. It is so fun to walk by a student at his/her desk and give instant feedback like this, "Hey, I love where you're going with this! Why don't you add six dollars' worth of adjectives to make your writing even better?!"

And speaking of writing activities, the menu comes with a reusable writing activity that can go with any writing assignment!

How to Use the Included Writing Activity

All you have to do is have your students highlight a sentence that needs improvement, or you can highlight one for them. Use the activity again and again, and challenge your students to make their writing as "expensive" as possible!

If you're thinking right about now, "Hey, that menu is great and all, but I just want to focus on certain parts of speech at a time. Everything all at once may be overwhelming for some of my students," don't worry. I thought of that too.

The beauty of this Parts of Speech Menu is that it is inclusive. It's a visual aid that truly works for both students who are exclusively general education students and students who are also part of the special education program, but also come to work with resource room teachers like me!

Click here or on the photo below to bring my inclusive Parts of Speech Menu to your classroom and empower your students to level up their sentences and become more confident writers!

Until next time! Lauren