What it is: The Adjective Detective is a fun way for your students to learn more about adjectives, superlative adjectives, and comparative adjectives. This interactive learning module, game, and quiz comes from the Children’s University of Manchester site (I have written about it before here). Last week I was searching high and low for some good adjective interactives for my students and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover this one. I knew if the activity had fallen off of my radar, chances were that others had forgotten it, too. The Adjective Detecive offers students a in-depth, interactive mini lesson on adjectives, superlative adjectives, and comparative adjectives. After students work their way through the lessons, they can play an adjective game as a detective. They must hunt down adjectives in the sentence by clicking on it with their magnifying glass. Students recieve immediate feedback on their answer. When they are finished playing the game, students can answer multiple choice questions about adjectives in an online quiz.
How to integrate Adjective Detective into the classroom: Use the Adjective Detective mini-lessons to teach your whole class about adjectives. Put the site up on your interactive whiteboard or projector and discuss the different kinds of adjectives with your students. The site could also be used for self guided learning (I am personally a big advocate of this!) as a computer center in the classroom or individually in the lab setting. After students complete the mini lessons, encourage them to play the adjective detective game. In my classroom I want students to enter the spirit of play and have a few detective hats, magnifying glasses, and mini notebooks. Students can play “detective”, hunting down adjectives in sentences. On the interactive whiteboard, the student at the board can find an adjective that the rest of the class writes down as an adjective clue in their notebooks. Then we pass the detective job onto the next student, until all of the adjectives in the game have been discovered. You could alternatively send students to the classroom computers as a grammar center where the students become “detectives” and jot down their adjective clues while they are at the center. The multiple choice quiz lends itself nicely to assessing understanding with clickers (student response systems). The quiz can also be taken individually on the classroom computers. I like learning sites, like this, that allow students to work through learning at their own pace and offer immediate feedback so that students can monitor their own understanding.
Tips: Check out the rest of the Children’s University of Manchester website for other good interative lessons.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using The Adjective Detective in your classroom.
