Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this episode, I am (once again!) excited to teach you how I teach! I’m especially excited because this episode involves teaching elementary students. Yay for the littles!
I love teaching how I teach elementary students because I really want to spread the message of hands-on learning, incrementality, slow introduction to difficult concepts, and application of each thing these littles learn. I love to do this for my young students.
I dig in right off the bat with some criteria that I have for teaching prepositions to these students:
- Fun
- Easy to succeed
- Repetitive
- Self practice
- Tricks…always tricks!
- Less about purpose than with olders (but still with purpose)
Always Teach Purpose Behind Everything You Teach—With Olders, the purposes for prepositions are many and easily understood when they have a good grasp of sentence structure:
- Subject is almost never in a prepositional phrase
- The girls, along with their brother, are coming to class.
- In between lunch and dinner at the school yard, we play for hours.
- Prepositional phrase openers
- During the last lengthy blackout, we used up all the candles.
- Using objective pronouns well
- She gave the book to Jon and I. No! She gave the book to me. She gave the book to Jon and me.
- We had no idea it would get around to Cami, Kara, and I. No! We had no idea it would get around to me….so use me as object!
- Give more details
- Focus on this with elementary students
- Sentence building
Especially with Elementary and Middle Schoolers: Teach with images, mnemonics, rhymes, interactives, and check sentences
- Bugs on a Log
- Preposition Packets (Plane, Castle, Reindeer)
- Check sentence
- The plane flew _____ the clouds.
- The boy played _______ class. (time)
- Repetition
- Weekly Think Fast Quizzes
Teaching Specific to Elementary Students
- Introduce as a part of sentences that give more information
- Focus on object too
- Interactives at first
- Verbal activities
- Sentence building
It’s all here! AND, I give you some pages from my most elementary preposition product: Bugs on a Log. (Don’t worry…I explain how to make your own interactive/manipulative too!)
Note: This lesson came from Bugs on a Log, a downloadable book in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
