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Relevant for Primary School teachers and students.

Homonyms 2 (Stein)

Lesson

Activity 3

This lesson continues our look at homonyms. 

Take for example the word fast

How many different meanings and word classes can you think of?

Look at these two sentences: 

  1. Katie works very fast
  2. Katie is a fast worker.

They have very similar meanings, but in one sentence fast is an adverb and in the other an adjective.

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Hyponymy (Stein)

Plan

Activity 1

Show the learners the list of three nouns. Ask them to discuss the questions in pairs or small groups. 

After a couple of minutes, reveal the focus of the lesson in the next slide: how nouns can relate to each other by being more general or specific. Use the example to demonstrate. Ask learners if they can think of any other examples. Don't worry if they struggle at this point, as they will see more throughout the lesson. 

Ask learners to make notes on the new terminology as they will need it for the other activities. 

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Hyponymy (Stein)

Lesson

Activity 1

Look at these three nouns.

What is the relationship between them? Can they be arranged into a logical order? 

  • Dog
  • Poodle
  • Animal

We can label nouns as general or specific. The specific noun is included in the general noun.

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Morphology - an introduction: Activity 1

Activity 1: Finding word parts

From the list below, pick out the words that are complex. Can you break them down into meaningful parts?

  1. bread
  2. sunshine
  3. fossil
  4. sleepwalker
  5. unhappy
  6. umbrella
  7. rebuild
  8. laughing

There are some further questions on the next slide.

Now look at the parts of the words that you have found. Which ones can be used on their own?

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Morphology - an introduction: Activity 2

Activity 2: Same word or different words?

Would you say the following are different words or the same word?

  • hesitate, hesitates, hesitated, hesitating

It depends what we mean by ‘word’! In one everyday sense, they are all different words.

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Morphology - an introduction: Activity 3

Activity 3: How many words?

Look at the sentence below and answer the following questions:

  1. How many different words, in the sense of dictionary words, are there?
  2. Which items can be grouped together as forms of the same word?
  • I think teasing tigers is unwise, because I teased a tiger once and barely escaped alive.

 

No 'AND's

In this lesson, students build a story without the word and.

Goals

  • Recognise the uses and meaning of the word and.
  • Become more conscious of our own use of the word and.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will tell a story. There's only one rule: no one is allowed to use the word and.

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Noun endings

Exploring suffixes and how they affect word class

In this activity we will look at suffixes which change verbs and adjectives into nouns. This process is a part of derivational morphology. 

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Noun identification

In this activity, students work through the criteria for identifying nouns.

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Noun identification: Activity 1

Which words do you think are nouns?

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Noun identification: Activity 2

I'll see you on Thursday.

Is Thursday a noun?

  • Does it represent a person, place, thing or idea?
  • Can it be singular or plural? Can you say one ___ and two ___s?
  • Can it be possessive? Can you add 's or ' at the end?
  • Can it follow the or a?
  • Can it be replaced with a pronoun like it, he, she, or they?

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Noun phrase generator

Try this noun phrase generator in class. Your students will enjoy creating weird and funny noun phrases using the interactive whiteboard.

Goals

  • Create some new noun phrases.
  • Examine what can and can't happen in noun phrases.
  • Evaluate example noun phrases, looking at why they do or don't work.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will be generating noun phrases. 

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Nouns and only nouns

Students are asked to communicate using a bank of nouns - and nothing else.

Goals

  • Communicate with a partner using only nouns.
  • Discuss what can and can't be easily expressed using only nouns.
  • Determine which other types of words are useful for expressing complex ideas.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that this activity will involve you trying to express progressively more complicated concepts and actions to a partner using only these words, your own body language and imagination.

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Nouns and vocabulary

Lesson

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday nouns, and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Activity 1

Look at this list of nouns: chair, fork, dog, house, person, football player

What do they all have in common?

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Nouns and Vocabulary (Stein)

Plan

Activity 1

Show the leaners the the list of nouns. After hearing their ideas, explain what concrete nouns are, and ask leaners if they can see or find any other examples in the classroom. Explain what abstract nouns are and ask for any other examples. 

Next, ask the learners to work in pairs and small groups. Copy down the table and decide which nouns are concrete or abstract. Check the answers as a whole class. 

Concrete: spoon, bed, grass, snow, clock, panda, pillar  

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Part and Whole (Stein)

Plan

Activity 1

Ask the learners to read the five sentences. In small groups, ask them to discuss what the words in blue have in common. Guide the discussion towards: 

  • They are nouns
  • They refer to different animals 
  • They describe parts of animals

After the discussion, show the learners the solution in the next slide to check their answers. 

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Part and whole (Stein)

Lesson

Objective

To explore the way that nouns can point to parts and wholes of things.

Activity 1

Read the five sentences below: what do the words in blue have in common?

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Past participles in composition

This activity involves working with nonfinite clauses to do some sentence-splitting and sentence-joining. The purpose is to develop your awareness of the different kinds of structures that are available to you as a writer.

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Past participles in composition: Activity 1

His report, published yesterday, demands fundamental changes in the way safety is regulated in the North Sea. →

His report was published yesterday. It demands fundamental changes in the way safety is regulated in the North Sea.

Invented in the late sixties, the melotron used a complicated system of loop tape recordings to achieve an effect similar to sampling. →

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Past participles in composition: Activity 2

Beckett’s early work was written in English over the period from 1929 to 1938. It seems restless, nomadic. →

Written in English over the period from 1929 to 1938, Beckett’s early work seems restless, nomadic.

The electromagnetic bell was patented in 1878 by Thomas Watson. It is rugged, reliable and loud enough to be heard from some appreciable distance. →

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Playing with person

In this exercise, students make changes to pronouns in texts, and evaluate the effects of those changes.

Goals

  • Identify first, second, and third person pronouns, and practise switching from one to another.
  • Evaluate the effects of writing using different personal pronouns.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will make changes to existing texts by changing the personal pronouns in those texts.

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Playing with person: Activity

I’m sitting here looking out of the window. Nothing’s happening; it never does. I sit here every day for hours on end, just looking. Looking for what? I don’t know. They never told me what I should be looking for. And I’ve never found out.

I once thought I’d found something, but I couldn’t be sure. It might just have been a trick of the light. How was I to tell?

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Polysemy (Stein)

Plan

Activity 1

Explain that the word polysemy refers to the idea that words can have more than one meaning

Ask the learners to think of more than one meaning for the words football and mouse and discuss with a partner or small group. Show the next slide to reveal some possible answers.

As an extension, see if learners can come up with any other words with multiple meanings. 

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