The Purpose of Prepositions {FREEBIE}

We spent a lot of time this week working on prepositions.  This is an area of difficulty for many English Language Learners.  I often have students who misuse the words "for" and "so."  And it's difficult teaching the purpose of so many "little" words.  But this week, I tried to break it down by sorting prepositions into two groups: when and where.

I started by briefly defining the role of  a preposition and then having the students identify the prepositions they were using in their sentences to describe the what they saw in this picture:

 They said that the net was ABOVE the girl, the ball bounced ON the floor, she will shoot the ball THROUGH the air, etc. Verbally, they did a great job!  So we moved onto a very quick worksheet I made.  The students used the words in the word bank to complete the sentences with prepositions that show where.  Here we ran into a little trouble.

A few of my students had difficulty with sentences such as "The barbeque was ___ my uncle's house."  I read more than a few "on my uncle's house." We talked about what that would look like {although, in this city, it's not necessarily impossible for a barbeque to be ON someone's home!}.

On the bottom of the sheet, the students wrote a sentence using a preposition to show where.

The next day, we talked about prepositions that tell when.  This one seemed much easier for the students to understand, although we did talk a lot about the word "by."

They worked on another set of sentences and then wrote their own sentences to tell when.  From this student, I can see that she is able to complete the sentences, but she is still showing some confusion about using the word "in" to show when.  {She wrote "the book City of Ember is in my desk."}

On the third day of working with prepositions, I had my students sort sentences with prepositions that show when and where.  Each student received a sentence and collaborated with a partner to find the preposition and then tape it to the correct poster.

This was another great opportunity for a quick assessment.  By glancing at the posters, I was able to identify two partnerships that had difficulty with  either identifying the preposition or determining how it functions in the sentence.

For homework, I gave the students a blank card and asked them to write a sentence with a preposition that shows when or where, their choice.  On Monday, I'll tape the words around the room and they will walk around the room and write the sentences on a T-Chart!  I also plan to extend their learning to prepositional phrases and prepositions that show a relationship.

While I'm not done with the entire package, I'd like to offer the sentences to sort as a freebie.  Click HERE to download the sentence headers and 12 sentences to sort from my TpT store!

 

Enjoy!