You belong to me...

Possessive nouns. The time when apostrophes start sneaking into every.single.word that ends with an s. Every year, I add a little more to my plans for teaching possessives to REALLY try to stop that before it starts. To start, we talk about plurals. And how plural means more than one. And how MOST plurals end with an s.

Then we talk about owning things. We start simple with singular possessive nouns and I go through and name things that are mine in my room. This is Mrs. Sz's pen... table... chair... etc. And then give examples of things that belong to certain students. Johnny's seat... Amy's shirt... etc. Then I write a few on the board and ask the students to figure out what they all have in common. Then we watch this video from the Electric Company. Students get a real kick out of this. To keep them interested, each student gets a sheet of paper, folds it into fourths, and picks four things that they would/could own. I tell them they can have anything they want with apostrophe s.

I love this one with the money tree!

The next thing we do is read Greedy Apostrophe: A Cautionary Tale. We talk about how now that we learned about possessives does NOT mean that the apostrophe can just stick himself in all of our words ending in an S. I honestly think this was the best year with this. It only happened a couple times with the greedy apostrophe sticking himself where he doesn't belong.

The next day, I hung some pictures on poster paper around the room. Students got into groups and traveled from poster to poster writing possessive sentences. I gave them 3 minutes at each poster to come up with as many possessive sentences as they could. (I am sorry the pictures are so far away, I am adding captions so you can make sense of what they wrote.)

Tigger's costume is a pirate. Winnie the Pooh's costume is like Tigger. (Pooh spelled Poo.. of course)

The scarecrow's hat is big. The lion's fur is brown.

 By the end they had quite a few sentences...

The next day may have been a favorite activity and was something new I did this year. After learning about plural possessives and practicing those we were ready for our class book. We made a list of the alphabet on the board and as a class we came up with nouns for each letter of the alphabet that were Halloween-ish (this was mid Oct.. yep that is how far behind I am on sharing with you!). After we made the list, students picked which noun they wanted. They then had to figure out something that could belong to that noun, write a sentence about it, and then illustrate it. (Of course all of the pictures that I took are of singular noun pages, but I promise there were some plurals in there too.)

The final thing we did was put all of this knowledge to good use. We did some writing! I started by reading The Scarecrow's Hat. The students made a text to text connection to the story What About Me from our reading series. After that each student took some type to make a scarecrow and decorate his/her hat anyway they wanted. When they finished they had to write about their scarecrow and his/her hat using possessives. The idea of the scarecrow came from Christina Bainbridge. This one was super easy to modify for my kids that struggle with writing. Instead of writing a paragraph about their scarecrow, they just wrote a few sentences. They LOVED it. And they were so proud when they were hanging up in our room.

Now... if only I could get them in the habit of speaking correctly and using the possessives instead of just saying "Payton coat is on the floor." But we are getting there- they know I am going to correct them so usually someone else jumps in to correct the mistake. Not in a "you're wrong, I'm right" kinda way... just in a "Hey she taught us this and wants us to sound like intelligent people so this is how it goes" kinda way.