Do your students groan when you bring up the dreaded subject of grammar? Unfortunately, grammar instruction tends to be dry—but not if you have fun grammar exercises to engage your students!
Middle schoolers can be a hard group to teach, but making grammar exercises fun keeps them focused on the task at hand.
Fun Grammar Exercises for Your Classroom
First of all, let me preface this by saying these exercises don’t make up for regular grammar teaching and instruction. These are simply fun ways to cement those grammar lessons into your students’ minds.
That said, I think you’ll enjoy this list…
1. School Newspaper Copy Editors
You’d be surprised how much this activity will engage your students. Start by creating a fake newspaper. You can do this by grabbing real newspaper stories and intentionally adding in grammar errors.
Your students will then be the “copy editors” who need to make sure that the fake newspaper is error-free before it hits the press.
To add a little more engagement, split your students up into teams so that they have to find and correct the errors collectively.
Adding a little competition among the teams can’t hurt. You can do this by making each team a different newspaper, and the newspaper to get their paper done first wins!!
2. Grammar Bulletin Board
In this exercise, your middle schoolers will again have a sense of ownership, just as with the pretend newspaper.
In this case, though, you set up a bulletin board in your classroom, where everyone can pin images of grammar errors … or memes that show why grammar is important.
Here’s an example:
Of all the fun grammar exercises, this one may be the best because some of these mistakes are hilarious. Plus, your students will have a blast finding images of errors to pin to the board! 😊
3. Silly Writing Assignments
For this exercise, you need to come up with some crazy writing scenarios…
For instance, you could have your students write a pretend letter to their alien friend on Mars, a diary entry about their recent discovery of a new species, or a newspaper article about Superman’s latest heroic act. (The more ridiculous, the better LOL!)
Then you use these fun exercises to integrate grammatical instruction and use errors as teaching points.
They’ll be much more engaged because of the fun nature of the assignment…
4. Add a Little Competition
It’s almost scary how competitive some kids can be, even with fun grammar exercises!
Have your students compete to see who can complete the grammar worksheet first. Or maybe even just incorporate little prizes for the students who can answer your grammar questions correctly during lectures.
5. Hot Potato: Grammar Style
If you thought Hot Potato was just an elementary school game, you’re dead wrong. I’ve seen young adults play this game and have a blast!
That’s why I’m sure, with a little grammatical twist, your middle schoolers will have just as much fun—and learn in the process.
With Grammar Hot Potato, you choose a grammar category (e.g., “nouns,” “adverbs,” or “perfect participles”) and set the timer. The student with the potato (or ball) gives an example and passes it. It continues like this until the timer goes off—and the student still holding the ball is out!!!
6. Grammar Bingo
Grammar Bingo works a little bit differently than regular Bingo…
Start by creating Bingo cards with squares listing different instructions. For example, one square might say, “Find a sentence written from a first-person point of view” or “Find a sentence in the past perfect tense.”
Then give your students a resource, such as a newspaper or a magazine. Whoever fulfills the instructions to get Bingo first wins! 😊
7. Grammar Crossword Puzzles
Your students who love puzzles will get the most out of this one.
The hints for these crossword puzzles will be all about grammar. For example, one clue might say: “Kind of clause that is a complete thought” (as with this grammar puzzle created by Mary C. Howard).
If you need help, this site makes it a lot easier to create your classroom crossword puzzles.
As far as fun grammar exercises go, this one is great because even if a student doesn’t know the answer outright, they can still guess based on other answers to the crossword clues.
Come Up With Your Own Fun Grammar Exercises
Hopefully this list gets you going in the right direction, but don’t let it confine you!! Brainstorm and come up with your own ideas for fun grammar exercises that can engage and delight your students.
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