You can teach verbs in many different engaging ways! If you don’t know by now or if this is the first blog post you’re reading from me, I love getting my students up and moving. When you teach kindergarten, you take as many opportunities as you can to get those wiggly bodies out of their seats (or rug squares)!
Verbs are especially simple to create engaging lessons where students can move because the definition of a verb is just that – “something you can do”. Here are the 3 activities I use in my classroom to teach verbs to my students.
4 Movement Activities to Teach Verbs
Charades to Teach Verbs
This is a NO PREP activity which is always what we look for as teachers. Gather students at the rug or somewhere where all students can see each other. Choose a student to come up to the front. They choose a verb such as swim, eat, sing, etc. and “perform” the verb. Then, they choose their classmates to guess which verb they were performing.
Add more movement by having the rest of the class copy the movement the performer is doing before or after they guess!
You can do this activity completely with no materials, however, many little students have a hard time coming up with a verb on their own (especially if they’re shy).
Take them Outside (or to the Playground) to Teach Verbs
Anytime you can take students outside their engagement is automatically higher. After discussing verbs, take your students outside and have them play, move, run and notice all the verbs they do outside. I like to do this on the playground because there are many more action verbs that they can do such as slide, swing, jump, climb, etc.
This is another NO PREP activity! You can have a discussion about verbs before, go outside and have students notice the verbs they can do and then bring them back in and record all the verbs they did on an anchor chart.
Lesson Extension: Verbs we can do Product – at home, on the playground, at school, at the doctors, at a restaurant, at my friends house, at a birthday party, at the beach, at the pool, on the soccer field, at the park, at my grandparents, at baseball practice, at my neighbors house, at the ice cream shop
Freeze Dance to Teach Verbs
I use freeze dance in basically everything I teach. There’s always a way to make freeze dance work for whatever skill you’re teaching. Again, another NO PREP lesson!
The way we play freeze dance when learning verbs is I’ll put on a song (Kidz Bop is my favorite). Students dance around the room until I stop the music. When the music stops, I pull an equity stick (or call on a student) and they tell us a sentence. This sentence can be about anything! Then, the class says the verb in the sentence all together when I count to 3.
For example:
Student I pick says – “The cat ran to the park.”
Pause for the class to think…
Class all together on 3 – “ran”
Then the music starts again!
Another way I use freeze dance is when I teach sight words! Check out this post: Sight Word Run the Room – A Sight Word Movement Game
Verbs Around the Room
Again, when you can incorporate movement in a lesson, both you and your students win! This verb game is a great way to teach verbs. In this resource there are two different versions that you can use depending on the level of your students or you can use the first version in the beginning of the year when you introduce verbs and the second version once your students are more comfortable with verbs. Two for the price of one!
Version 1: Students walk around the room and find the cards numbered 1 – 12. When they get to a card, they complete the verb activity. Then, they go find another card. They can do this in order or not.
Version 2: Students walk around the room and find the cards numbered 1 – 12. When they get to a card, they complete the verb activity such as “jump 10 times”. After, they read the sentence on the card and find the verb. Then, find the same number on their recording and write the verb from the sentence.
Have you tried any of these verb activities in your classroom? Share how it went below!
