What is a noun?
We were talking about nouns with my senior writing group today; common nouns, proper nouns and pronouns – what they are and when would we use them.
So just for the last 10 minutes I thought I’d set them a challenge for proper nouns – I wrote up the following categories:
people
city
month
important day
country
region
Then one of them called out, "Hey, Mr Evans we could do civilisations." Never one to turn down self direction and general enthusiasm, I wrote it up.
When the group reached "civilisations" they blew me way, here is the list they came out with, off the tops of their collective heads: Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Norse ("Rub out Viking Mr Evans, they’re the same thing"), Aztecs, Chinese, Mongols, Spartans, Persians and Atlantians.
That is quite a collection for a "special needs’ writing group so I asked how did they know so many.
One said " I used to be into the Egyptians, went to the library all the time. Go loads of books and videos and stuff."
Another answered "Some of those are in Age of Empires too."
The conversation followed:
" Hey, can we do a civilisations thing in this group?" they ask.
"Sure, why not." I say.
"Yeah" says one. "We could write a book about different characters and creatures and legends and cities and stuff, eh? Mr Evans."
There is the motivation right there. I’m looking forward to gettting their computers networked next week, then I talk about wikipedia and google searchesand all that sort of stuff. I love it when I stumble cross a button like that… Switching the kids on.
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