Grammar

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2002 : April : 24

Grammar
By Kathy

Dear Donna and Teri:

It's my opinion after teaching third graders for the past 14 years there are certain concepts (this is one) that no matter how much we try, they aren't all going to "get." I think it's important to
introduce them to parts of speech, but I finally stopped empasizing it as much as the textbooks did and realized some of these concepts come with maturity.
What I discovered that first year of teaching third grade was that a lot of these grammar concepts were way above some of the less mature students. Example: After a "great" lesson on tenses of verbs--past, present, and future--we

were doing an activity out of the book. One child looked up and said, "But, teacher, I don't know how to spell president." He didn't have a CLUE what we were doing!! It was equally hard to convince my faster students that "The bird sang" was a complete sentence since (they argued) it didn't tell what kind of a bird or where it sang!

I finally decided to concentrate on writing instead and grammar as it works in writing--for instance if you use a descriptive verb you don't need as many adverbs. Verbs are so crucial to good writing--they move the piece along. We collect "million dollar verbs."

A specific noun (giant) is better than an adjective with a nondescript noun (very, very tall man). (Or toddler as opposed to little child) I found exposing them to the concepts through writing really seemed to help.

One fun thing we have done with subjects and predicates is to have students write subjects on one set of cards (The brown puppy, the silly clown, the brilliant cardinal...) and predicates on the other (chased the ball across the yard, balanced a ball on his nose, flitted through the bushes....) Then you mix them up and read one subject and one predicate. The results are hilariious!!

I try to have fun with grammar, but not overly emphasize it at this age.