Assign students a section on nouns from a grammar book the day before you begin this lesson. In class begin by discussing the characteristics of nouns. Ask students to explain what nouns are and to provide some examples of different types of nouns, such as proper, plural, abstract, compound or possessive. Show flash cards of different types of nouns and ask students to identify all their characteristics.
Give the students a short worksheet on nouns, requiring them to come up with different types of nouns, such as a proper possessive or a plural abstract noun, or asking them to underline the nouns in a brief text. Go over the worksheet in class, discussing any difficult areas in further detail.
Play a game involving nouns, such as showing two students a flash card with a noun and asking them to change it to a possessive or a plural form.
You could also have students highlight and label all the pronouns in a newspaper article or arrange students into teams and ask them to give the correct form of a pronoun to complete a sentence, including difficult ones such as "who" and "whom."
Open the discussion of verbs by writing several sentences on the board and asking students to identify the action word. Explain how verbs operate in a sentence, and discuss the characteristics of a verb, such as its agreement in number with the subject, the different tenses it can take and its ability to be transitive or intransitive and active or passive.
Write some verbs with different properties on the board and ask students to identify them on a sheet of paper. Discuss any problem areas in further detail. Ask students to come up with verbs of their own that satisfy certain criteria, and ask them to change the number ans tense and of various sentences.
Give students magazines, newspapers, construction paper, scissors and glue, and ask them to create collages with strong action verbs. Ask students to write a verb on a sheet of paper and use these verbs to play charades. Arrange your students into groups, give each group pictures and ask them to give very precise verbs to describe the action shown.
Ask students to bring in passages from their favorite books, and have them read aloud to the class. Ask the rest of the class to write all the strong action verbs they hear, and discuss their findings when the passage is through.
Before this lesson plan, ask students to bring in an object from home. It can be any type of object, but you may want to advise them to bring something with a strange shape or texture. When you begin the lesson, ask the students to describe their objects. After everyone has finished, discuss how students used descriptive words, called adjectives, to tell the class about their objects. Explain what adjectives are and what kinds of adjectives there are. Emphasize the importance of using strong, clear adjectives in writing, and demonstrate the ways adjectives must agree with their modifiers. Note special adjectives, such as articles or adjectival clauses.
Approach adverbs in a similar fashion, asking students to describe an action verb of their choice. Underscore the lesson with activities such as Pictionary, charades or collages. You can ask students to find advertisements in magazines that use strong adjectives to sell a product, or you could give students nouns and ask them to draw adjective bubbles with all the words they can think of to describe it.
Students can usually identify nouns after a segment on nouns, but it can be a little trickier after a lesson on adverbs. Mix a little review into each lesson, and challenge students to keep every part of speech in mind. After you have covered all the parts of speech, ask your students to combine what they have learned by giving them entire sentences to change, such as a plural sentence to make singular or a present active sentence to make past and passive.
Give students worksheets with various grammatical mistakes ranging from misused adverbs to improper pronoun-antecedent agreement and have them correct each one. Ask students to create mad-libs and have the students pass them to the left for another student to complete. Let students proofread each other's assignments, and tell them that part of their grade will depend on the grammar of the paper they checked.