| Grade Level | System Requirement | Product Number |
|---|---|---|
| Grades 1-2 | Apple 128K | A271 |
| In this special toy shop-when no one else is around-animals, dinosaurs, and other creatures come to life to help your young students learn the basic parts of speech, subject/verb agreement, present and past verb tense, and sentence structure.Includes management option for tailoring the program to your students’ needsBuilds basic grammar skills. | ||
INTRODUCTION
Educators’ decision to embrace the whole language approach in language arts instruction has acted as a catalyst to re-examine the role of grammar in language arts instruction. Rather than treating grammar as a peripheral tangent in a fragmented package of language arts instruction, teachers are integrating grammar within reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
The design of Grammar Toy Shop supports the whole language approach in language arts instruction. The first two programs, Silly Toys and Toy Wishes, feature instructional objectives related to development of grammar skills typically introduced formally in grades one and two.
However, the foundation for each of the activities is an interactive story so that students use grammar skills in context rather than in isolation. In each activity, students see the powerful results of recognizing and using proper grammar.
For example, in the program Silly Toys, students select a sentence ending that describes what a toy animal wears, holds, or eats and add it to a predetermined sentence starter. If their choice results in a grammatically correct sentence, two dynamic things will happen. First, the students’ toy animal will visually react by either wearing, holding, or eating whatever the sentence indicates. Secondly, the sentences that the students create will form a story that describes their toy animal. These stories and animals can be printed.
Grammar Toy Shop is a set of three programs designed to provide first- and second-grade students with opportunities to strengthen their grammar skills. The product gives students practice in creating complete sentences with subject/verb agreement and appropriate verb tense and in sorting parts of speech.
Students can exit a program by pressing the Escape (Esc) Key whenever the program is waiting for a response. Sound may be turned on or off at any time by typing Control-S (press the S Key while holding down the Control Key).
Grammar Toy Shop is a product from MECCs Grammar Series. Future products in this series will include software packages designed to reinforce grammar skills for elementary school students.
Program Information
Title: Grammar Toy Shop Grade: 1-2
Subject area: Grammar
Program type: Guided practice
Hardware: Apple II series computer with 128K of memory and one disk drive; color monitor highly recommended.
Classroom use: Individual student
Learning objectives:
- to combine sentence beginnings and endings to construct complete sentences
- to determine appropriate subject/verb agreement to construct complete sentences
- to determine appropriate use of present and past verb tense to construct complete sentences
- to select from a variety of sentence endings to create a story
- to recognize nouns, pronouns, action verbs, and adjectives in a paragraph; to classify words as nouns, pronouns, action verbs, and adjectives
- to apply understanding of sentence structure in a game format
- to apply understanding of classifying words as nouns, pronouns, action verbs, and adjectives in a game format
- to develop a game strategy.