Middle School Grammar Games and Activities

Many middle school students consider learning grammar a chore because grammar lessons and assignments tend to be very boring. You can make grammar more fun for your child by incorporating it into a game or activity that reinforces the concepts being learned in school.

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What Are the Standards for Middle School Grammar?

During middle school, students learn to recognize active and passive voice, understand the functions of phrases and clauses, avoid sentence fragments and identify parts of speech. They also learn to avoid or correct inappropriate pronouns and modifiers. Middle school students vary sentence structure in their writing, using simple, complex and compound sentences. The activities and games below can be used at home to help your child boost these grammar skills.

What Games and Activities Can I Use to Encourage Grammar Practice?

Parts of Speech Activity

Give your child some print materials and a pair of scissors. Suggest one or more parts of speech for him to find. For example, you can ask him to cut out various adjectives. He can then write a paragraph using them and glue his words into place as he writes.

Sentence Fragment Race

You can play this game with your child. Write five sentence fragments each. Swap papers and see who can turn them into complete sentences the fastest.

Modifier Challenge

A misplaced modifier makes a sentence sound confusing by separating a word, clause or phrase from the word it describes. A dangling modifier describes a word that is left out of the sentence. Write several sentences containing misplaced or dangling modifiers, or search for examples online, and challenge your child to correct them. Afterwards, ask him to write his own sentences with misplaced or dangling modifiers to help increase his awareness of them.

Proper Nouns Scavenger Hunt

On a sheet of paper, write down several categories, such as places, holidays, teams, events and organizations. Give your child a newspaper and set a timer for 20 minutes. Ask her to find as many proper nouns as possible that fit into each of the categories and write them on the paper.

Clause Mix-Up

A clause has a subject and a predicate, but it is not always a complete idea. Independent clauses can stand alone as sentences, while dependent clauses cannot. For this activity, ask your child to write several independent clauses in present tense on index cards, followed by an equal number of dependent clauses in present tense on separate cards. The independent and dependent clauses should be in two separate stacks, which you can shuffle. Have him choose a card from each stack and construct a sentence using them, even if it's nonsensical, by writing it down with the proper punctuation.

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