Preposition Planes!

Although I truly love teaching grammar as a language nerd, it is a dry subject that sometimes goes over students' heads. To attract more interest and more importantly, retain concepts, I found a neat preposition lesson from the blog Teaching in Room 6. To grasp how prepositions are used in prepositional phrases as dependent clauses, students created paper airplanes, flew them outside, and then wrote where their planes landed-- in, on, above, under, beside, along, etc.-- Success! All of these prepositions flying around in our heads finally make sense when we tie them to a physical activity! Fifth graders immediately understood how to form a prepositional phrase once they let their planes go. These planes jetted all over the basketball court, as you may notice in the attached photos. After collecting 8-10 phrases, the students wrote a poem beginning with their phrases and ending with a simple independent clause. I challenged students to use verbs other than "flew", and some chose beautiful ones like "glided" and "soared."  What a great way to teach the concept of prepositions and their functions; there is nothing like getting outside and using our physical muscles to strength our brains!