Teaching Nouns in Kindergarten

In the Journey's reading series, we introduce nouns within the first couple of weeks of school.  I introduce nouns over three weeks. The first week we only do people nouns, the second week we teach place nouns, and then the third week we do things/animal nouns.  We started off by brainstorming people nouns and making a list on the white board.  We continued to do this each week.  Then, the last week we used these cards from Lori over at Teaching With Love and Laughter.

The kids LOVED sorting these cards together. When we were done, I told the students that they were going to make their own poster.  Some kids weren't sure what a 'poster' was, so I showed them a couple of poster examples that I had in the classroom (ex. color poster, hundreds chart, etc.). Then, I split the class into four different groups (making sure to put a 'writer' in each group).

 Each group had to make their own nouns poster.  They started off by writing 'person', 'place', and 'thing' at the top.

 Another student in the group traced the letters in sharpie and another student colored the letters.  This gave more students the opportunity to contribute.

 Then, they had to draw at least three items in each category.  If they wanted, they were allowed to use the cards we sorted on our whiteboard. 

Look at how cute these pictures turned out!! 

 Then, they took turns tracing their words and coloring in their pictures. I always walk around and make sure everyone is contributing. If I see a child just sitting there, I give them a job to do. Eventually, I want them to create their own jobs. But since this was our first time doing a group project, I had to remind them of different things to do a little bit more than normal. 

 When all of the groups were finished, they came to the carpet and sat with their group.

I called one group up at a time to present their poster. 

 They weren't shy at all!! The students took turns reading the different images they drew.

This was the first collaborative group activity we did this year, and they did AMAZING with it!! I was so impressed! This month we will do our next group activity--sorting facts onto a venn diagram to compare bats and birds.  I am sure they will impress me again!

The noun cards I used in this activity can be found here.