Engaging First Grade Google Classroom Digital Activities for ELA Centers
Grammar plays a role with reading comprehension and writing development, so its important students are getting a firm foundation with grammar early on in elementary. It can be tough to find engaging first grade grammar activities to use in one’s ELA centers. That is why I came up with some digital activities that can be used in Google Classroom. I wanted to make sure students could easily decode the sentences as they practiced these grammar concepts from the standards and worked towards improving their writing. I wanted to make sure they were as hands-on as much as possible, so I added fun twists like sliding magnifying glasses and punctuation marks. Also, I made sure to include activities that used higher-order thinking, so I made sure to have things like fix-it sentences to get them analyzing and fixing the errors.
At the beginning of each digital grammar activity, I include a video that plays at the beginning of each of them that teaches the grammar concept. Now these videos are not meant to replace great teaching instruction, but they are great for review before completing the activity. However, you can also certainly use these activities in your classroom with an interactive whiteboard to teach a mini-lesson and do some guided practice with them.
I also made sure to include kid friendly instructions with each resource if your students will be using these independently as a center activity.
If you have ever looked at the Common Core standards for grammar, you know how much ground there is to cover and how some of the things they want mastered seem to be a bit much for first grade. I worked diligently to make sure to cover these standards while putting a lot of thought into making them developmentally appropriate. At the beginning of the year, you may have students that are still grasping basic reading skills. However, its important to start covering grammar out the gate to make sure to cover everything that year. That is why I made sure to include some grammar activities for first grade that did not involve the need for decoding sentences, but students could still work in developing an understanding for things like adding an -s to make the word plural.
Understanding proper nouns and the use of capital letters was another grammar standard I felt students could start to learn early on in first grade too.
Building up student’s oral language with using things like demonstratives is also a concept that is good for the early part of first grade. Just like the sentences above, these grammar activities do not involve sentence decoding either, yet students are learning proper usage of words like these and those.
When you are ready to combine sentence decoding and grammar to get students to apply these concepts in their writing, its important to start off with some familiar concepts like action verbs. With this activity students decode the simple sentence and mark the action word with a star.
As students begin to gain a firm foundation in recognizing and understanding verbs and plural nouns, they can then move on to subject-verb agreement. These activities can also flow over into their writing activities. You could easily put a focus that week in writing workshop to get students paying attention to their use of nouns and verbs in a sentence to make sure they agree. Application is always important, but sometimes there is definitely a gap between grammar and writing when they do not have some focused, engaging activities to make these concepts more concrete. It is hard for young students to apply grammar when the concept has never been made concrete to them. These activities play a huge part with grammar use in writing because it provides visuals in their minds to help them recall as they write and gives them some hands-on practice. That makes the concepts more concrete to them. The more concrete, the more they will be able to apply the use of subjects and verbs agreeing in their writing.
Another aspect of verbs to cover in first grade that is important is verb tenses. This is important because often they will come across many past tense verbs as they read. This aids in them being able to decode these words more easily by recognizing that -ed on the end is a change to the tense of the verb. Additionally, the understanding of future tense verb use will also help with reading comprehension as they begin to understand writing that is taking place either in the past, present, or future. This also flows over into their writing as they learn to write narrative pieces.
Conventions are another important area that needs a lot of additional practice for students. Drag and drop activities add a fun and engaging twist to help make this concept more concrete.
Here are some comma activities where students work on adding commas to dates and items in a series.
Teaching about simple and compound sentences is another important area to cover in first grade. To set a firm foundation with simple sentences, students can complete the sentence by adding the predicate or telling part to the sentence. This particular set also includes some sentences where they have to add the subject instead.
Once students are ready to write more complex sentences, you can show them how they can combine two sentences into one with a conjunction. Since the books students read are becoming more divergent with the sentence structures, it is important they learn to understand how compound sentences are two complete thoughts. Recognizing various sentence structures as we read is all part of improving reading comprehension.
Students can become more familiar with conjunctions with this fun red light activity.
Having students find errors in sentences and fix them involves higher-order thinking, so it is a good way to get them thinking about things like the use of capital letters, punctuation, verb agreements, and more.
Other grammar concepts to teach in first grade include different types of pronouns, adjectives, and more. Here are two adjective activities. The first gets students use to the idea of how some adjectives can describe one of the five senses. The other one has students describing a noun with any adjective they choose.
This pronoun activity has students fish for the pronouns. Then they move onto the other slides and swap out the noun or nouns with a pronoun.
With this activity, students spot the indefinite pronoun in a sentence.
Possessive nouns is another area to cover in first grade. This simple activity has students distinguishing which ones are possessive. The other nouns that are not possessive either are plural or normally end with the letter s. The apostrophe is drag and drop too.
Later on after students understand both pronouns and possessive nouns, they can learn about possessive pronouns with this drag and drop activity.
The proper use of articles is another area that is commonly taught in first grade. These sentences are easy to decode and students decide which article to place in the sentence.
Spelling is another area of grammar, so I created some different spelling activities. This one has students focusing on spelling patterns.
This other activity has students using inventive spelling. The final one is a sight word activity that focuses on the spelling of commonly used sight words. You might not always think grammar activity when you first see the sight word activity, but the Common Core standards actually mention students use conventional spelling with frequently irregular words. The standards also mention that students use phonemic awareness and spelling patterns to spell untaught words too.
With these digital grammar activities for first grade, your students will be engaged as they develop their writing and even reading skills. You can find these all individually or sold as a bundle at a 50% discount in The Candy Class store on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Find the first grade digital grammar activities bundle by clicking here.
Looking for individual resources instead of the bundle? Find the first grade individual grammar resources here. Looking for kindergarten digital grammar activities? Click here. You can also find second grade digital grammar activities here.
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Jolene Mathew
