Blog

Nicole Rooney, M202 Head Teacher at 45th Street

Grab your backpacks and let’s go on an “Amazing Race” around the world of English grammar!

For the past few months, Ms. Rooney’s 6th and 7th grade writing group delved into the topic of conjunctions, appositives and appositive phrases. They learned different ways to incorporate these grammatical constructions throughout their writing to make their sentences more descriptive. To bring this unit to an exciting conclusion, students took part in an interactive “Amazing Race” game that also allowed teachers to assess their understanding of the concepts introduced.

Just like in the Amazing Race television series, students were divided into small groups to complete challenges, but they were required to demonstrate the proper use of conjunctions, appositives and appositive phrases. The race began by one student from each group being called upon to answer a specific question. The correct answer prompted them to receive an official looking yellow Amazing Race envelope containing the next challenge question. Next, students were tasked with coming up with their own sentences using the appositive phrase “a famous author.” An example answer would be, “J.K. Rowling, a famous author, wrote the entire Harry Potter series.” After this, each member of the group answered one question to ensure that everyone had the opportunity to practice their skills. Other tasks required students to underline the appositive phrases within particular sentences. For example, “The NY Mets, the best baseball team in the MLB, won the World Series.” As students advanced through the stages of the competition, they had to write multiple sentences using the following: conjunctions, nouns, appositives, and specific appositive phrases. Lastly, they had to name all of the coordinating conjunctions associated with the FANBOYS acronym (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So), a useful strategy for remembering the seven most common coordinating conjunctions.

Once students completed all of the tasks, they were reminded of a famous quote attributed to Helen Keller: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!” This interactive game allowed students to build upon their teamwork and sportsmanship skills while also putting their newly developed grammatical skills to the test.