Teaching Plural Possessives

What Is a Plural Possessive?

A plural possessive is when a plural noun or pronoun shows ownership of something. For example, the word "dogs" is a plural noun, when put alongside of the word "bowl" you have a plural possessive because you would say the dogs' bowl. Seems easy. Well, it can be the challenge lay in adequately teaching this lesson to young students.

Methods For Teaching Plural Possessives

There are many teaching methods that you can use. Teachers use flashcards, Bingo games and even tailor the Jeopardy game towards their lesson on plural possessives. Get creative when you are thinking of methods to teach plural possessives. Whatever you choose to do, be sure it is fun and exciting.

Flashcards

Many teachers opt to do flashcards simply because they are quick and easy to do. However, after a while, using flashcards can easily steal a student's motivation simply because flashcard practice can quickly become mundane.

Plural Possessive Bingo

Bingo is a widely known and renowned game nationwide. You can incorporate the game of Bingo into a lesson on plural possessives by color coding the columns on a Bingo card and then using sight words instead of numbers.

You can elect a different student to be the Bingo word play announcer with each passing round.

Plural Possessive Wheel of Fortune

People readily recognize how to play the game Wheel of Fortune. You can purchase the board game for under $20 and tailor the game board to include the words in your lesson on plural possessives.

Select two students to be the "Pat Sajack" and "Vanna White" of the game.

Plural Possessive Jeopardy

You can customize a game of Jeopardy to reinforce what you have taught on plural possessives. Select at least four categories to use in the game in order to maintain a certain level of intrigue with the students.

Individual or Team Game

You can break the class into teams of four to six. Have a member of each team go to the board. You can time them for how many sight words they can write down in thirty seconds. Make sure that you have a stop watch and a whistle so that when you call time and whistle the students will stop. You can then tally up who (or which team) listed the most words.

Have Students Teach Each Other

Break the class up into teams of four and have each team teach their own customized lesson on how to recognize plural possessives.

By having the students teach a class you are encouraging them to learn about plural possessives in such a way that they have no other choice but to learn about them so that they can better convey the information to their classmates. This particular activity will prove to be quite intriguing to many of your students because they will get to be in charge of the class for the day.

Additionally, you can consider having students compile worksheets on the plural possessive nouns of their choice. The worksheets can be distributed to the class and the students can devise an answer key for each worksheet.

Role Reversal Day

What if you decided to throw up the white flag as the teacher and took a seat as one of the students? Start out with a sentence like "Let's pretend that you are the teacher today..."

You can take a break and give the reigns to the students for a change. It will give you the chance to see if your students are actually retaining the lessons that you are teaching.

Encourage your students to make handouts for the class to use. You can also give them ideas for games that they can lead for the class.

When planning for a role reversal day, be sure to not put any pressure on your students. Just keep it light and fun. All you want to do is show you what they have learned.

Mini Quizzes

You could consider giving your classes mini quizzes.

A quiz is a direct learning mechanism. It allows your students to show you whether or not they are grasping the information.

Importance of Lesson Planning

No matter what you decide to do, you should make it a point to completely plan out your lessons on plural possessives to be sure that you keep your students motivated and that your students learn the lessons that you have presented.

Be sure to incorporate the element of fun into the learning process. It will prove to be a good learning experience for your students.

• Think of what students in their age range find exciting. For many of them, it is playing a Wii game. Perhaps you can incorporate the Wii game into the learning process. If they are playing Wii Bowling then maybe in order to have a turn at playing you can have them come up with three plural possessive nouns and write them down on the board in five seconds.
• Not all student have fun in the same type of activity. So, vary the activities to keep up the interest level.

Make it challenging and exciting and you will find that your students will rush to learn as much as possible about plural possessives and any other grammatical lesson that you teach.