Today I had the opportunity to watch the children in my class work with language materials. Many of them had not used them before so they were all quite excited to be able to use them for the first time.

There were a variety of boxes to choose from and the children work from left to right starting with the pink ones. With each box, they learn new grammatical structures.

This is an example of the pink box. The student was creating compound words using the labels. The start and end words have a blank space beside it as a control of error so the child does not begin or end with the wrong labels.

Upon completing the sequence, the student would write the new words into their language book for assessment.

This is an example of a student learning prefixes. One label has the prefix while the other has the word that it can be attached to in order to change the meaning of the world. Having the prefixes on the right side of each card and the words on the left side of each card allows the student to understand that the prefixes come before the word instead of after it.

There are similar sets for teaching students suffixes as well.

These are the Montessori Grammar symbols. In the Montessori curriculum, each grammatical structure is given a symbol. For example a verb is a circle because verbs are dynamic and move similarly to a red ball. By having symbols representing each grammatical structure, students are able to remember them with ease.

Once the student learns the grammar symbols, they are able to deconstruct sentences and label the symbols accordingly to recognize the placements of the grammatical structures. They begin to learn that nouns come before verbs and adjectives come before nouns as describing words.

Each sentence on the green card becomes more complex and the child needs to add on new symbols accordingly. The words are printed on a piece of paper with the corresponding grammar symbol colour as well to create a connection between the symbols and the structures.

I found this way of learning grammatical structures to be enlightening. I had never thought of learning sentence structure in this way and it was interesting to watch the children try to figure out each structure on their own. The control of errors with each material allowed the students to self correct and I only needed to help guide their learning when they did not understand a word or if they called on me.

I appreciated how all the students were able to work on their own materials and move through them at their own pace. I noticed that some of the younger students would watch the older ones work on their materials in awe and hoping that they could work on the same materials. Perhaps this created a sense of motivation for them to master their own materials.