Explaining parts of speech for young children
The Wordsmyth Illustrated Learner’s Dictionary (WILD) is adding a new collection–Parts of Speech–to its Language collections. With fully animated explanations, now you can help your students get a clear and basic understanding of concepts such as noun, adjective, verb, or adverb. Here is a quick peek:
The full Parts of Speech collection will be available in WILD this summer. Watch for it in the Collections under the Language category. While waiting, subscribe and check out the amazing features already in WILD such as the following:
- interactive world map
- animated Language collections for teaching prepositions and verbs
- Picture Dictionary for readying children for kindergarten
And so much more…
Helping older children understand part-of-speech concepts as well as how to use a dictionary
The Wordsmyth Children’s Dictionary, designed for upper elementary students, offers simply-written but slightly expanded definitions of the different parts of speech, which can be accessed by clicking on the part of speech labels that are listed for any particular word in the dictionary—the word “plant” for example, has various definitions for “plant” as a noun and “plant” as a verb. Clicking on the Part of Speech label for “noun” or the Part of Speech label for “verb” will bring up animated explanations of these concepts. Understanding of the parts of speech, besides being important for language and academic development generally, is important for understanding how a dictionary functions, as they are key to the way dictionaries organize and present information about a word. As words tend to have multiple meanings, understanding the parts of speech will help children locate the particular sense of the word they are looking for when they use a dictionary by themselves.
And now, for your convenience, we’ve gathered all the explanations of Parts of Speech contained in the Children’s Dictionary into one post in our blog! It’s called “Parts of speech explained for grades 3 to 6,” and it’s there to support you in your teaching of these important concepts.
Advanced support for teaching ESL students and older students the parts of speech and related concepts
A unique feature called Grammatical Patterns in the Advanced level of the Comprehensive Dictionary provides even more support for ESL students and teachers. In addition to offering a guide to verb constructions in English, the feature offers a glossary of grammatical terms, which are explained in quite simple language but go into a fair amount of detail in order to answer often-ignored questions about parts of speech and other fundamental grammatical concepts (such as “clause,” “phrase,” “direct object,” “participle,” “gerund,” etc.). These are truly a must-read for teachers! Click here for a look in our blog to see how the grammatical patterns feature explains the parts of speech. We also hope you will look at the additional comprehensive offerings we have in the Grammatical Patterns Glossary. We’re sure you will enjoy exploring all the topics!