Ditch the dull drills and say goodbye to yawns—teaching grammar to kids can be engaging, fun, and educational if you want it to be.
Whether you’re trying to help your child understand the differences between superlative and comparative adjectives to be their best selves or just want to teach them the basic rules of sentence structure, there are countless out-of-the-box activities to make grammar come alive.
Here are a few engaging grammar activities your kids will love to get you started!
The Power of Play in Learning Grammar
Play is a child’s best educator. As psychologist Lev Vygotsky believed, play is a leading factor in a child’s development, helping consolidate skills and self-regulate.
When tackling the nuances of grammar, a skill that demands precision, problem-solving, and being okay with making mistakes, having good self-regulation skills is important. Playful, engaging activities can bridge the gap between different emotions and behaviors while learning.
It’s not just a break from seriousness; play is a strategic approach to making grammar less daunting and more accessible to young learners.
Grammar Games Galore
Grammar games are perhaps the most obvious way to teach grammatical concepts. Here are a few ideas.
Grammar Taboo
Games like Taboo inject fun by challenging kids to describe a word. In this game, players draw a card. On that card is a word they have to help their teammates guess with clues; however, to make it a little more challenging, there’s a list of “taboo” words they aren’t allowed to say on each one. The original Taboo game isn’t grammar-specific, but you can easily DIY your own. Some topic ideas could be parts of speech, types of punctuation, adjectives, or even common nouns vs. proper nouns.
Dress-Up Grammar Fun
Another entertaining activity bound to bring lots of giggles is this plural and singular noun dress-up game. Invite kids to dress up toy characters or themselves while identifying singular and plural nouns. You could make it more challenging by giving them a checklist to tick off each time they find an item of clothing, leaving a blank space next to it where they can write that item’s singular or plural counterpart. For added excitement, set a timer and encourage them to beat the clock.
Use Board Games & Online Games
Exploring board games and online games with a language twist can further enhance learning. To make grammar lessons enjoyable and interactive for young learners, select games like Word with Friends, Scrabble, or Bananagrams that involve constructing sentences or identifying parts of speech. Improve vocabulary with solver tools like Words with Friends Cheat, which kids can use to help them construct and unscramble common verbs and nouns from their letters in word games. Type in your letters, choose the word you want, tap on it, and find out some common definitions, some example sentences, and what part of speech they belong to.
Get Arty! Creative Grammar Activities
If your child prefers art to language, why not incorporate some hands-on, messy fun into your grammar instruction?
Punctuation Collage
Been learning about punctuation? Try making punctuation collages. Grab a bunch of newspapers and magazines, a couple of glue sticks, and some big sheets of kraft paper. Go wild trying to construct sentences with correct punctuation at the end. Stick, cut, and make letters to add to your sentences or make punctuation rule collages focusing on one type of punctuation at a time to stick up around the house.
Get Fixing! Grammar Repair Workshop Activity
For budding engineers, a Grammar Repair Workshop activity can be a great way to reinforce grammatical structures like contractions. Just like nails connect pieces of wood, contractions build words. In this activity, kids have to connect words using apostrophes. Words like that and is become “that’s,” while you and are” become “you’re.” Print off or DIY slips of paper with the two words that make up a common contraction, for example, does and not become “doesn’t.” You can print off another set of apostrophes.
The aim of this grammar activity is for kids to identify the words that pair up to make the contraction and to add the apostrophe in the right place. Once they have done this, they can write the new word down on a whiteboard or paper. You could lean into the fix-it theme of this activity and write the words on tool shapes. Why not laminate the words so you can easily clean them and use them for more grammar practice?
Tech-Savvy Learning
While we don’t suggest relying on technology for all your child’s learning, incorporating digital tools can make your grammar activities more engaging — plus, having basic digital literacy skills allows children to feel safe and assured online.
Paperless Digital Grammar Worksheets
Explore the Wordtips Grammar blog for digital grammar quizzes and online flashcards. Kids can work alone through their Antonyms worksheets for kindergarten and first graders or try out one of their other interactive quizzes. Find what you want by filtering by age or by type of content.
Grammar Expert Podcasts
Podcasts are a hugely popular form of content, so why not try making your own? Create a podcasting project where kids become language storytellers, making grammar engaging and relatable. Kids can become grammar experts by busting grammar FAQs like how to use an Oxford comma, the difference between “fewer” and “less,” or when to use “who” vs. “whom.”
Give them plenty of time to research the topic and script their episodes. Encourage them to use plenty of examples, explaining their chosen grammar topic as if they were speaking to someone who didn’t know anything about it.
These types of engaging activities help kids to become experts in their “fields,” boosting their confidence and knowledge at once. Use follow-up questions to check for understanding.
Get Outside!
Learning doesn’t just have to happen at a table or inside, so go outdoors and embrace grammar activities when you’re out and about.
Grammar Hopscotch
Liven up grammar lessons with interactive activities like Grammar Hopscotch, where each square contains a part of speech.
Each time a child hops to the new square, they have to say something that belongs in that category. For instance, if the square is labeled interjection, they might say “phew” or “ouch.” If you’ve been learning about adjectives, they might say “difficult” or “freezing.” This activity is highly adaptable for different abilities and levels, so younger kids can join in, too.
For an extra challenge, see if they remember what words they said, give them a piece of chalk, and ask them to write three sentences down using the words they remember.
Grammar Escape Quest
Combine all their learning and try a hands-on grammar escape quest where kids have to solve clues and grammar-related puzzles.
In this immersive experience, each puzzle station presents a particular grammatical challenge or task. Some puzzle station task ideas include identifying specific parts of speech from famous passages, ordering adjectives on a whiteboard, or conquering vocabulary crosswords to unlock a secret word. Equally, you could combine the activity ideas from this blog to create your immersive grammar quest.
After solving each task, kids collect clues that lead them closer to their escape. You could place locks and keys they must unlock for an extra touch of drama and suspense. For example, at each station, they have to solve the quest. Once solved, they will continue to unlock various boxes and gain numbers to a hidden sequence to unlock the largest box with a prize inside.
Set a timer, put your feet up, and let them crack the code.
Phew! With all that grammar fun, hopefully, planning engaging grammar activities for kids will be less daunting and boring. By providing kids with the opportunities to play, you’ll soon see they’re happy to learn difficult concepts. Plus, the more engaged they are, the more they will learn too.