Nouns

The new Common Core Standards are being used in full swing now at my school and I for one am loving the Common Core. At first, I was concerned about the increase in rigor and wondered would the kids really be capable of what they're asking them to do.  Well, I have since realized that yes they are and it's so important that we don't limit kids because often times they will surprise you. 

Below are some ideas for teaching the Language standard on Nouns - Common and Proper.

We started out by watching a BrainpopJr clip on Nouns.  The kiddos love Moby so anytime I can incorporate Brainpop I definitely try to add it in.  After watching, we started our tree map on nouns.  We decided that nouns are used to name things and to start out with we were going to focus on people/animals, places, and things. 

After reading A Mink, A Fink, and a Skating Rink - A Story about Nouns, we added more nouns to our list (for now - common and proper nouns mixed...I was mainly worried about them understanding the noun without them worrying about what type of noun it was).  After studying, common nouns for a week we took our Common Noun Sorting Assessment.  We use Thinking Maps at our school, so I used a tree map for the assessment that matched our class anchor chart map.

Common Noun Word Sort - Tree Map Assessment

Week 2, we focused on the difference between common and proper nouns.  This was a little tricker to explain and the kids have definitely struggled a bit with this.  We first used the anchor chart we originally created about nouns and went back and reviewed the words.  We used two different colors and circled the common nouns in one color and the proper nouns in a different color.  Then, we read the story A Lime, A Mime, a A Pool of Slime - More About Nouns.  After reading the story, we made a tree map only for proper nouns.  See below...

After studying common and proper nouns, the kids took a test, again set up like the anchor chart tree map, however this time instead of sorting into people, places, and things, the kids had to decide if the noun was a common noun or a proper noun.

Common and Proper Noun Sort Tree Map Test