Doing Words

If naming words are the who and what of a sentence, doing words are what happens — running, laughing, eating, falling. A sentence with only a naming word ("The dog") doesn't go anywhere; add a doing word ("The dog ran") and suddenly something is happening.

Try this: act out a doing word together — jump, spin, clap — and ask your child to guess the word from watching. Then switch: say a doing word and have them act it out. This physical version usually clicks faster than any explanation, because the word and the action land at the same moment.

Once that feels easy, put a naming word and a doing word together out loud — "The cat jumped," "Grandma laughed" — and ask your child which part was the "who" and which part was the "what happened." You're not asking them to label anything correctly yet; you're just getting them to notice that sentences are built from those two jobs.