Grammar Boxes and Grammar Box Cards

Direct aim. To see how each part of speech works in a sentence by building, changing and acting out sentences.

Indirect aims, the ones you will not see at once

Eight wooden boxes. The first has two compartments, the second three, and so on, to nine in the last. Each compartment has a title card in the color of its part of speech. A larger slot at the back holds the sentence cards.

Word cards in the same colors, one word each, and sentence cards to build. Bought card sets match each box; Alison's set runs to 147 pages.

Colors differ between sets. Montessori's 1917 boxes used black for the noun, tan for the article, brown for the adjective, red for the verb, violet for the preposition, pink for the adverb, green for the pronoun, yellow for the conjunction and blue for the interjection. Many modern sets match the grammar symbols instead.

The objects the sentences name, gathered on a tray: a cup, a red pencil, a ribbon, a book.

A table with room for a sentence laid in a line, and a strip of paper and pencil for copying.

1. 1Bring the first box. Show the two compartments and read their title cards: article and noun.Say "This box has two kinds of words." Point to each title card as you read it.
2. 2Take out the cards, mixed, and lay the nouns in a column. Read the first: "cup".Silent A neat column; the order of the cards doesn't matter yet.
3. 3Find an article to go in front of it, "a" or "the", and read the pair. Let the child pair the rest.Say "The cup." Read the pair as one phrase.
4. 4Return the cards: all the articles to their compartment, then all the nouns.Silent Articles first, then nouns, each to its own place.
5. 5On another day, with a later box, take a sentence card from the back slot and read it silently: "Close the door."Silent The sentence card gets read in the head, not aloud.
6. 6Build the sentence in a line from the colored word cards, taking each from its compartment.Silent Each card comes from the compartment its color names.
7. 7Carry it out. Then swap one card, "Lock" for "Close", read the new sentence and carry that out too.Say "What changed?" Ask after the second action, not before.
8. 8Have the child build and act the rest. Then they copy one sentence and mark each word with its grammar symbol.Say "Your turn." Then step back.

One card swapped, and a whole new action.

A sentence with the verb taken out: nothing happens.

Each compartment filling up with words of one color.

Acting out "Fold the paper", then "Unfold the paper".

The compartments and the colors. A card returned to the wrong place shows by its color against the title card. In the sentence exercises there are exactly enough cards for the sentences, so a leftover card means a mistake.

Montessori’s name for this check is the control of error.

• Changing one word and acting out the difference: "the red ribbon", "the blue ribbon"
• Taking a card out to see what the sentence loses, as Montessori's teachers did in play
• Writing the built sentence and marking each word with its grammar symbol
• Sorting the cards of a finished box back by color, against the clock
• Writing new sentence cards for a box, for a younger child to build

Variations

This work needs only the material, so it has no printable of its own. The shelf plan below places it among the other works for the same age.

Free to print for your family, no email needed. Print at 100%, not “fit to page”, so the drawings keep their scale. Every printable on the site is listed on the printables page.

Ready for the first presentation

Ready for the next lesson

Keep small objects for the sentences off the floor if a toddler is around.

We have not bought the paid homeschool curricula, so they are not listed here.

1. Maria Montessori, The Montessori Elementary Material (1917)

   Part I, Grammar

   The word cards are oblongs of one size in different colors, black for the noun, tan for the article, brown for the adjective, red for the verb, and they go in eight boxes, the first with two compartments and the eighth with nine.

   In the first box the child places the black noun cards in the compartment with the black title card and the tan article cards with the tan title card, which recalls the alphabet boxes.

   The child's task is to put the right article in front of the right noun, then to gather all the articles and all the nouns back into their boxes.

   In analysis the child draws a slip with a printed sentence and builds it with colored cards taken from the different compartments.

   The teacher changes the position of a card as though in fun, and removing a word shows that the meaning of the sentence depends on the order of the words.

   In the verb box the sentences Close the door and Lock the door differ by one card, showing that a sentence changes when the action changes; the child performs the action and builds the sentence.

   For adjectives the child finds the color tablets named in phrases such as the green color, and changes only the adjective card as he changes the tablet.

   The complete grammar box has nine compartments: article tan, noun black, adjective brown, verb red, preposition violet, adverb pink, pronoun green, conjunction yellow and interjection blue.

   Acknowledgment

   The publishers credit the photographs showing the Grammar Boxes to the House of Childhood, 16 Horatio Street, New York.

Lesson text and the scope and sequence are CC BY 4.0: reuse them with credit to Owen Wren, Homeschool Montessori, and a link. Photos and illustrations are all rights reserved. Terms.