Grammar

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Home : 2008 : February : 14

Grammar
By sonshine

I teach third and fourth and I do think it's important for children to be aware of the basics of parts of speech. They need to have at least heard of the words: noun, verb, adjective... However, I never spend a LOT of
time on it for a few reasons:

First of all, I remember going to a Halloween party where we had to put in a certain part of speech in various places in a story. These professionals (doctors, dentists, etc.) were all saying, "What on earth is an adjective? What is an adverb?'' Which led me to think: OK, how important is it for me to spend a great deal of time making sure my

third graders have mastered these terms?

Then I had a couple experiences in my class which reinforced the feeling that this wasn't particularly developmentally appropriate at this age. I remember teaching a class on verb tense to my first third grade class and one of my "strugglers" came up to me and said, "But, Teacher, I don't know how to spell president." I realized, "OK, he is not getting this at all!!" (We were doing past, present, future tenses.)

Around the same time one of my sharpest kids insisted that the sentence "The birds sing." could not possibly be a complete sentence because it didn't tell what kind of birds or where they sang!!!

So I tended to lean towards lots of reading and writing and teach the grammar incidentally. (For example, as I'm reading a story--"shuddered" Wow! That's a great verb!!)

I spend more time teaching why using exact nouns and verbs can bring your writing to life than in identifying what a noun and verb is. Truthfully, if you use the right nouns and verbs you barely need the adjectives or adverbs!

I taught grades 5-8 Language Arts for three years and that's the age when it begins to click in. It's really idiotic to have to spend much time with it in the primary grades when they don't "get it" no matter how much effort you put into it.

Note: We did do some diagramming sentences in our 5-8 class. I think it helps the students really figure out the parts of speech.