Basic Parts of Speech for Sentence Structure Part 2- With Farm Box

Farm Box is the Montessori way of teaching basic sentence structure. In the earlier post, Basic Parts of Speech for Sentence Structure – Part 1, I shared some interactive activities to introduce the concepts of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Once your students are familiar with these concepts separately, it is time to put them together to build a sentence.

Montessori Farm Box – Sentence Structure

What is included in the Montessori Farm Box

1. Farm animal picture cards – 3″x3″
2. Black noun cards – 3″x3″
3. Gray article cards – 3″x3″
4. Blue adjective cards – 3″x3″
5. Red verb cards – 3″x3″

Articles in the Sentence Structure

Every sentence needs an article. Montessori article cards are gray. If your students are in the phonetic reading stage, they won’t be able to decode the word, ‘the’. You will have to introduce the word “the” as a sight word. You can point to the ‘the’ card and say this is ‘the’. You can also let them know that we shouldn’t sound it out.

Steps

1. Ask the child to lay all the picture cards vertically on the table.
2. Take the stack noun cards, and ask the child to read one by one and match them with the pictures.
3. Take the stack of gray article cards and ask the child to lay them in front of the noun cards
4. Now, ask the child to read the first phrase. It should say, E.g. “pig The”, “duck A” or “hen The”…etc
5. Ask the child if that sounds right. Let the child figure out how to fix it or move the cards so they will sound right. This is the most important step when it comes to learning the positions of parts of speech.
6. Once the child figures out, let him/her fix all the phrases.

Adjectives in the Sentence Structure

You will need a set of black noun cards and matching picture cards and some blue adjective cards. Depending on the child’s level, you can choose to use all phonetic words or non-phonetic words.

Steps

1. By this stage, the child should know how to lay the picture cards, noun cards & articles.
2. Ask the child to read the adjective cards and match them with the phrases. Remember, when it comes to matching the adjective cards, there can be a few matching cards. Let the child decide which adjective describes the animal most.
3. Now ask the child to read the first phrase. It should say something like, “The duck is soft”
4. Ask the child if that phrase sounds right.
5. Let the child figure out how to change/switch the cards to make them sound right.
6. Once he/she figures it out, ask him/her to fix all the phrases and read them all over again.

Verbs in the Sentence Structure

This stage is easy. There won’t be any switching, because the verbs come at the end anyway. But you can ask the child if it sounds right, just to highlight the fact that the verb card is in the right place. This way it will help the child to internalize the position of the verb in the sentence structure.