Verbs: Lesson plans and teaching resources
Action Verbs
Students add action verbs to sentences.
Active and Passive Voice
Links to explanations and handouts for teaching active and passive voice.
Awesome Action Words
Students will learn to replace boring, redundant, generic verbs with more precise "Awesome Action Words." This lesson is designed for grades 3 and 4 and includes support materials.
Clean up your Grammar
In this game students sort nouns and verbs into the appropriate category. The game uses an engaging "clean up the beach" approach, with incorrect answers leaving litter behind.
Compound VerbsInteractive practice identifying compound verbs. Follow links on the left to 2 more exercises.
Discovering Just the Right Word
Students improve their writing style by strengthening word choice at the word and sentence level by adding adverbs, precise verbs, and specific nouns.
Eliminate Weak Verb-Adverb Combinations
A teacher shares his approach to encouraging students to use strong verbs.
Fortune Cookie Verbs
During this lesson students have the opportunity to create fortune cookies and identify the verbs in the fortunes. Includes recipe for fortune cookies.
Grammar Goes Green?
In this lesson, students review what qualifies as a grammatically complete sentence. They then use a Times article about the movie, Hulk, to help them identify interesting and challenging nouns and verbs that they can later mix and match to form new sentences.
Grammar Gorillas
An interactive review of parts of speech for elementary students. Choose "Beginner" (nouns and verbs) or "Advanced" (all parts of speech).
Identifying and Using Action Verbs
Students find the action verbs in an online story and in Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes. They write a story using action verbs and visit a website that demonstrates verbs in action. This lesson plan is designed for grade 2.
Irregular Verbs: First Person Crossword Puzzle
A printable copy is available at the site.
Irregular Verbs
A set of 6 self-correcting online practice activities for high school and older.
Make-or-Break Verbs
A writer reflects on the impact of verbs, categorizing them as "powerful" and "wimpy." Good examples! Appropriate for middle school and older.
Passive Voice
A collection of lessons related to identifying and avoiding passive voice.
Pretests
Pretests and answer keys for identifying nouns, pronouns, and verbs.
School House Rock: "Verbs, That's What's Happening"
This Grammar Rock video introduction to verbs runs 3:00.
Subject-Verb Recognition Practice #1 and Practice #2
Definition, examples, and 10 practice sentences. Practice 1 deals with sentences in natural order. Practice 2 deals with natural and inverted order. Both pages include answers.
Tenses of Verbs
Students demonstrate an understanding of present, past, and future verb tenses through independent practice and by using these verbs in sentences to describe appropriate student-selected clip art. This lesson plan includes handouts and is designed for grade 6.
"Update Your Information"
Email scams often include bad writing. This handout, based on an actual email, contains 4 verbs used incorrectly and some other examples of weak writing. Appropriate for students who understand the word fraudulent; requires Adobe Reader for access.
Verb-Adverb Charades
Students draw a verb and an adverb from 2 stacks of cards, then act them out.
Verb Identification: Lesson One and Lesson Two
Interactive practices identifying action verbs, appropriate for elementary students and older.
Verb Identification: Lesson Three, Lesson Four, and Lesson Five
Interactive practices identifying linking or "state of being" verbs, appropriate for elementary students and older.
Verb Phrase Identification: Lesson 8
Interactive practice identifying verb phrases. Follow links on the left to 6 more exercises.
Verbs
A 1-minute introductory video.
When Is a Noun a Verb? Examining 'Double Duty' Words
In this lesson, students play with words that can function either as nouns or verbs, depending on context. They then find and parse "double duty" words in New York Times articles. Advanced students compare these instances with information in dictionaries and frequency count lists, showing which usage occurs more frequently in English.
