Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 4 Charting Noun Morph and Syn

A useful next step in your classrooms is to have students come up with lists of the morphological and syntactic rules of and cues for nouns. You can see an example here, modeled on one made in Dana Smith’s high school class (10th grade, Dana?), in collaboration with Anne Lobeck. (And you can see a presentation called “Teaching Teachers to Teach Scientifically” from the AAAS last year in Vancouver that includes a similar wall chart and some other context and explanation of this kind of approach to parts of speech. Also, Anne Lobeck, who organized the panel, and David Lightfoot, who presented "Language Puzzles: What They Tell Us About Biology, Experience, and Explanation" have a draft of an article "Teaching Science through Language" that grew out of that.) Oh, and TeachLing has a few lessons that approach parts of speech this way.

With something like this chart hanging in your classrooms or posted in students’ notebooks or whatever, students will have a handy way to identify a noun.

Happy nouning.