Parts of Speech in Context
A word's part of speech is its job, not its spelling. Mock is Vinny's verb when it means to make fun, and Jake's adjective when it means a practice version, the same word doing two different jobs.
The Mayor calls the cross-talk: one word can wear two hats, and which character owns it depends on the job it's doing in the sentence.
Review & Recall, spaced review for the words you learn, opens soon.
One word that wears more than one hat.
Play it in the Arcade.
Take it onto the floor with the live game. Free, with a new round every day.
One word, many hats. Send each word to the character whose job it's doing, then drop one word into two frames and watch it change its part of speech.
Play Many Hats →Two hats isn't the same as two words.
Peer and pier sound exactly the same, but they're two separate words. A pier is a dock that reaches out over the water. It only ever does that one job. Sounding alike doesn't make it the same word wearing a second hat.
Peer is one word that wears two hats: Nelson's noun, a person who is your equal (her peers in the music world), and Vinny's verb, to look closely (I peer through the fog). Same word, same spelling, two jobs.
A real vocabulary skill, Grades 1 through 8.
Parts of Speech in Context is one of the seven ways Grammaropolis teaches vocabulary, each mapped to a Common Core vocabulary strand. Every lesson is aligned grade by grade to Common Core, and the Wonderful Words workbooks are standards-cited across Common Core, Texas TEKS, Florida B.E.S.T., and New York Next Gen.
Teachers know these as word-learning strategies.
CCSS L.x.4.a and L.x.1 (a word's part of speech in context).
See it in the Standards Explorer →Other ways to know a word.
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