Haunted House of Speech

I want to share a great idea that the neighboring teacher used on Friday with her class. She called it the "Haunted House of Speech." She created a large haunted house template (a Victorian design several stories high, with balconies and cupolas and an elaborate roof, and blank spaces cut out of the windows and doors) out of cardboard and gave it to the students to each trace one on their large sheets of plain white paper.



Next she gave the students a list of grammar commands to symbolize and add to the illustration. They could choose any of the commands they liked, or create their own, as long as they copied them down and symbolized them (Montessori has a unique way of teaching grammar which involves using special colored pencils and a stencil).

Grammar Symbols -- What Do They Mean? article link

Each group of Haunted House commands focused on a part of speech and the part of speech was written in the appropriate color, also the strip of paper was on a colored backing. Verbs in Montessori are red so the command might read

Draw a pumpkin sitting on the front steps.

She had a whole slew of them including nouns (black) -- like Add a tree to the front yard -- adjectives (dark blue) -- Draw a scary witch in the sky -- plus verb (red), adverb (orange), preposition (green), conjunction (pink), and interjection (gold). Halloween is a great time to teach interjection. Boo!

One of them was Draw maggots oozing out of the windows. I think that was a Verb card. The children spent the entire day working on them. They loved this work!

For Waldorf, this would go under the category of Third Grade Grammar.