This is the spinner from the game James and I were playing recently. It uses a game board that looks like this:
It's basically a trail game . . . you start at one end and follow along to the other end. If you land on a pink dot, you jump ahead to the next pink dot-- except for the very last pink dot; if you land there you have to jump backwards to the previous pink dot.
The spinner in this game assigns a number for each of the 8 parts of speech. So whatever you land on is the part of speech you must use on your turn AND the number of spaces to hop along with.
It doesn't have any fancy name; we call it the "parts of speech sentence board game." It's easy to play, and can also be a lot of fun. Last time we played it the sentences turned into an ongoing story . . . it was suspenseful and interesting. But we don't usually play it that way. The only requirement on your turn is that you make a sentence that uses whatever the part of speech is that the spinner lands on. Then you can go the number of hops indicated, along the game path.
This game is really easy to make-- I found the clear plastic spinners at a school supply store-- the pink background with words and markings is just taped onto the spinner with small pieces of clear tape on two opposite sides. The game board (14" x 22") is a piece of poster board with hand-cut paper circles glued on. We use game pieces from a Parcheesi game.
It's great for a review of the parts of speech-- if kids don't know them all while playing, that's OK, too--you can give some examples if they don't know what kind of words to use for a certain part of speech.
Do you like to make games? Do you know of any others (homemade or not) that have helped in learning/practicing the parts of speech?
