Enter the Rubber Chickens

For the past eight years or so, rubber chickens have been a part of my middle school English/Language Arts classroom in Barrington, Illinois. These six rubber chickens are a true part of the class. They have names; those names change yearly. They live in a coop. They sit front and center, facing everyone. They are an attraction. Other students stop in just to see them. I cannot imagine my classroom without them. Here is their story.

While teaching an ineffective "name that part of speech" grammar lesson on direct objects about eight years ago, I became frustrated. I read a well-crafted, mind-blowing sentence like, "Joe ate a sandwich." Then, I asked for a volunteer from among the nearly sleeping seventh graders, to tell me what the direct object in that sentence might be. These were the answers:

"Huh?"

"Direct what?"

"Ate?"

"Joe?"

Notice the question marks. No one actually knew. They were hoping that the issue would go away -- that I would go away. It didn't. I didn't. I persevered. I did what any well-seasoned teacher of middle school students would do; I dug in my drawer of weird stuff. I found a small rubber chicken. I threw it across the room at Adam. He caught it. The entire class stared at me, hoping for an explanation.

"What just happened?" I asked.

"You threw the rubber chicken!" Adam said.

"What did I throw?"

"The rubber chicken."

"So," I continued, "what did I throw?"

"The rubber chicken?" Katie nearly whispered.

"YES!" I came unglued.

They all looked at me, mouths open.

"That means rubber chicken is the . . . "

Silence.

"Direct object?" wondered a small voice from the other side of the room.

I cheered!

What followed was a game of toss the chicken, roll the chicken, pass the chicken, bounce (unsuccessfully) the chicken, and catch the chicken. In every situation, the chicken received the action, so the chicken was the direct object. It worked! But it did so much more. A process began. I started using that sad little chicken for all sorts of things. I bought more chickens. We formed small groups with chickens. 

Chickens helped my students identify prepositional phrases, adverbs, adjectives, verbs, direct and indirect objects, and complete sentences. But we needed more. Identifying parts of speech was clearly not enough. We needed to write about the chickens to make things stick.