Organized Chaos!: Butterfly Parts of Speech

Parts of speech are confusing, just like our English language! Nouns and verbs are the simplest pieces but even verb spelling gets tricky because we have rule breakers and some verbs are different words completely.

Add adverbs, adjectives, and now prepositions into the mix and 7 year old start forgetting what each one means! The truth is, as adults I'd bet money on most people not knowing what those terms mean but just know how to use them in a sentence. Here's a little run down. Adverbs are words that tell when some thing happened--first, next, then, last, etc. Adjectives are our describing words--blonde, blue, round, large, etc. Our latest speech part is prepositions. These tell where a noun is at compared to another noun--The butterfly flew under the flower.

We are getting pretty good at being able to list them about certain objects, places, things and whatnot but identifying these in a sentences is still pretty tricky! Once they get confused, then even our nouns become verbs, they start throwing other terms such at synonyms and antonyms in there and we have to slow down a bit!

While we spent a lot of this week working on prepositions, I make sure to have them review the others as well. I read the book Buterflies! by Darlene Freeman to them and stopped to ask what certain words were to help give some ideas for our activity. It is a non-fiction book so it was loaded with all of the words that we were going to need.

Our first step was to assemble our butterflies! Must have taken this one a little sideways.

Each wing part then had to be labeled with a part of speech (noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and the body was prepositions).

Then, it was on to coming up with words under each category that explain a butterfly or a butterflies life. Here were our rules: nouns had to be butterfly body parts, adjectives had to explain what a butterfly looked like, adverbs had to help tell the life cycle of a butterfly, verbs had to be things a butterfly does, and prepositions had to explain where a butterfly could go.