Some games used to teach parts of speech are essentially drills made fun. Many online games belong in this category. Colorful interactive pages adorned with cartoon characters present words and sentences to the learner, who has to correctly identify the parts of speech. Timed tests add more challenge to the activity. Drills in school can also be made more engaging by dividing a class up into teams and having them compete with each other for small prizes.
In this kind of game, a teacher might present a whole sentence and have the students highlight different parts of speech using different colors. Alternatively, a teacher might provide the structure of the sentence, for example "article, noun, verb, article, adjective, noun, adverb," and have the students fill in appropriate words under each heading. Students can really have fun with this game if each student chooses a word without knowing what came before in the sentence. The example might result in a sentence such as "The hippo ate a melodious football calmly".
Children love playing charades. This well-loved activity can be adapted in different ways to teach parts of speech. One possible way is to have a box full of index cards with one word written on each card. The cards are color-coded to show the part of speech. For example, red cards can be nouns, blue cards, verbs, and so on. In this activity, children take turns to pick a word from the box and act it out for their classmates to guess. The color of the card tells the class what group of words they should guess from.
Parts of speech can also be taught using games that use art. The primary activity in this type of game is to look at a picture and come up with as many nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that one can find in it. This can be played as a team game where the team that finds the highest number of words wins. In a variation of this game, students can get more points if they find harder parts of speech such as adverbs.