Noun Town

This is a winning idea for teaching nouns for any First and Second Grade teachers out there.  I ran across it two years ago online somewhere so this is the second year that I've used the Noun Town to teach my students about nouns.  This time around the town was far more developed. 

Here is how the town and the lessons progressed:

Day 1:  Introduction of nouns as people, places or things.  We added places to our town.

How about that school or the pet shop?

Day 2:  Reviewed the definition of nouns and added things into our town.

You have got to love the little frog and his frog house and palm tree.

Day 3:  Reviewed the definition of nouns and added some people into the town. 

Look at the lady swimming! It's my personal favorite! :)

Day 4:  We turned our focus towards plural nouns and discussed nouns that have "s" added on to show more than one.  I let the kids choose anything in the town and make one more of it.

Stoplights.

Day 5:  We discussed nouns that end with  s, sh, ch, or x which when made plural have an -es added on to the end.  We then went back to the town and using little post it notes of different colors we labeled the things that we had more than one of that had s or es endings.

Day 6:  We discussed nouns that have a whole new spelling when they are plural such as mouse and mice.  The kids had also discovered that nouns that end in y need to have the y changed to i before adding es so we went back to the town and labeled anything we found like this with two more colors of post-its.

Day 7:  We talked about nouns that show ownership (eg. the town's mini museum).  Then I gave the students a sentence strip and let them write a sentence using a possessive noun to describe something they saw in the town.

There you have it!  Noun Town!  This group was very creative with opening doors, windows and flaps on the mailboxes.  Can't wait to see what the next one looks like!