Teaching Imperatives

Don’t you just love it when you get to teach an easy grammar lesson? I was thanking my lucky stars for this week’s super simple grammar chapter because I needed a little reprieve from the chaos of the week before break.

So here’s how I “do” imperatives-

We reviewed our procedural writing from last week, paying close attention to the verb forms we used. Then we determined that all of the steps of our writing piece began with the infinitive form of the verb without the “to”. After that, we put some examples on the board of common orders we hear either at school or at home… it wasn’t hard for them to come up with a handful of nags that they get every day from me and their parentsJ Once they understood what I was after, we did this fun activity where each student (could be group of students though) got a character and they had to write what imperatives that person would use. They LOVED it! Feel free to use them with your classes here.

Here are the notes we came up with for IMPERATIVES in English:

Purpose- Imperatives are used to give commands/orders, advice/suggestions, or directions.

Structure- Use the infinitive form of the verb without “to”

Examples- “Clean your room”, “Raise your hand to speak”, “Do your work”, etc