Teaching Verbs with Trains!

This post contains Amazon Affiliate linksI have found myself having to teach verbs so much this year…more than normal.  Some of my students with language impairments are having such a hard time with regular past tense, not even the cursed irregular, that I started from square one.  I acquired this Super Duper book and it really breaks it down to the nitty gritty, which my kids have needed.  In addition to this resource, I needed a little hands on activity, so I came up with this one!

First of all, let's talk about my love affair with the die cut machine.  It's fantastic.  I need all the shapes of all the things for all the activities.  And since the book uses the train analogy for piecing together a subject and verb, I stalked the patterns until I found an engine and car.  I also laminated, because I want to be able to use them over and over…I can use these for other things too (I'm thinking final consonant deletion, phonological awareness activities, and sequencing)!

We talked about how the engine is the subject, or who, of the sentence and that the car is the action verb, or what, part of the sentence.

Then we practiced putting them together.  Yes, the engine is backwards.  Yes, the kids pointed it out.  Sometimes, they are smarter than me.

Then I gave them their own train sets and they created a bunch of trains with subjects and verbs to describe various pictures in the book.  This was also great for working on pronouns, which we also need lots of practice with.  Grammar has a starring role in my speech world this year.

I also love this activity because it gets them practicing the tense in writing!  The kids really learned a lot and they always like using the dry erase markers 😉

Do you ever use die cuts for teaching?  I would love to hear your ideas in comments!