Many students find learning conventional grammar too difficult or boring. However, teaching grammar does not have to be a drag. Entice students into learning grammar by playing games that are both educational and fun. By preparing a list of about 100 words from different parts of speech, you can have students compete in groups while learning about almost any grammatical concept.

Preparation

Create a long list of words that contains at least 10 different words from each part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun and conjunction. Vary the types of words you include in the parts of speech. For example, use a variety of single/plural, concrete/abstract, proper/common, animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman and count/noncount nouns. Include several articles, demonstratives, quantities and interjections. These additional words can be repeated as you may use more than one in a single sentence. Type the word list using a larger font size, such as 16 point, leaving space between each word.

Divide your class into working groups to play the grammar games. The groups should be no smaller than three students and no larger than seven. Try and divide your class up evenly to be fair, so that each group has approximately the same amount of players. Also in the interest of fairness, each group will need access to the same list of words. Make one copy of your word list for each group.

Cut out the words. Since you left space between the words when you typed them up, they should be easy to cut out. However, the sheer quantity of words will make this task tedious. You could use a paper cutter to speed up the process and cut multiple sheets of paper simultaneously as they are all copies, and the space between words should be the same on each copy. Make sure that you do not mix lists, though. For example, if you have five groups, each group should have the same stack of about 100 words.

Put each group's stack in a sealed envelope, and label the envelope with the group's number.

Game Play

Configure your desks into clusters so that all the members in each group can work closely with one another. Give each of the groups an envelope filled with words.

Set rules for your games, and explain them clearly to students. A list of words can generate many different grammar games, depending on what you want to teach. If you are working on parts of speech, you can ask students to find all the pronouns, or sort the entire list into speech categories. You can have students generate phrases, such as verb phrases or prepositional phrases, and award points for the longest or fastest creations. You can even have students compete to create a grammatical sentence with a predetermined number of words.

Have each group compete, and use students' answers to help you teach. Explain why students' answers are wrong and how to fix them, so that students learn more about grammar.