This activity helps students understand the different parts of speech. For example, in the sentence, “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” you can separate the sentence into its component words. Pass out the words to students and ask them to line up to form the sentence.The child who gets the letter "the" heads up the line, followed by the child who gets the letter "quick," and so on. After they have done this, they can act out their words in turn. Ask students which words were easier to act out and why. They will find nouns, verbs and adjectives are easier to demonstrate than prepositions and conjunctions.
This exercise orients students to different languages by teaching them how to say “hello” in a variety of African languages. For example, in the South African Fly Taal language, “heytah” means “hello.” Also “bonjour,” the French word for “hello,” is used in French-speaking African countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
One way to learn new words is by dividing them into their component suffixes or prefixes and finding the meaning of the word’s root. This activity develops children's vocabulary. Learning word roots enables them to guess the meanings of new words they learn. For example, in the word “reconstituted,” the letters “re” form the word’s prefix. And in the word “readable,” “able” is the suffix to the word “read.”
This semantics-oriented activity familiarizes students with the Greek and Latin origins of certain words. For example, the word, “January” comes from the name of the Roman god “Janus.” To better remember what they learn, students can make flashcards with a word on one side and its meaning on the other.