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!
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