Why Review Parts of Speech?

The parts of speech can be boring, in fact a middle school student I see for private therapy (who does not really like giving up his summer swimming or baseball time) recently asked me, "Why do I need to know about the adverbs and pronouns stuff?" I don't love teaching it, but I have good reason. My answer to him was that he would need to know these parts of speech when he was writing, when he was taking state tests or if he wanted to learn another language (helping him to categorize the new words). I also like to incorporate this into therapy so that my older students understand how organize their sentences and correct their writing. I do a review of the parts of speech with 5th-8th graders primarily as they have already learned about most of the parts in their language arts classes. I don't cover all the parts of speech but like to review nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

1.) I start my review with this Poem:

2. Grammar Jammars App: 

We talk about each part and if they need more scaffolding I then review each part with an app called Grammar Jammers that is free put out by Pearson. They have two editions one for primary grades and one for later grades. It has cute and catchy videos like this one:

3.) Activities to Review

To make parts of speech more fun I have students create their own GrammarJammer Video or Flip book to remember the parts that are hard to remember (many times its adverbs). While we read a book together in therapy or when we are learning vocabulary we talk about the parts of speech and when I have students write a sentence.

I am interested to hear if you also find it functional to teach the Parts of Speech ? Why or Why Not??  

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.