grammar

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Home : 2005 : February : 27

grammar
By Mary

Kids need to learn grammar, if for no other reason than it lets us speak to them in the language of language. It does not make better readers or writers though, so I don't make it more than a very small part of my instruction.

One
of my favorite things to do is make students little "sentence fragments" with sentence strips. Then you have the kids physically move to complete the sentence. Every kid gets a sentence strip (or a word card, if you're doing parts of speech) and a marker. If you were doing dependent clauses, for instance, you could have two students holding the sentence parts that go around

the dependent clause, then let the dependent clause "elbow" its way into the sentence. To teach parts of speech, have one group be the noun group, one group be the adjective group, and one group be the verb phrase group. Each kid in each group writes something on his sentence strip (in the noun group, they choose any noun--bear, shark, girl, whatever), everyone in the adjective group chooses a strong adjective, like stupendous, colossal, breathtaking, and in the verb phrase group, they write stuff like: danced till dizzy, sang like a bird, cried like a baby, that sort of thing. Then, you choose a noun to go up to the front of the room, the noun chooses an adjective, and the adjective chooses a verb phrase. Since no one is supposed to know what anyone else wrote, you end up with sentences kids find funny, like: The stupid bear ran around in circles. The slimy fish sang like a bird. This can be used to teach subject/predicate and complete sentences, as well.

You can also drill them on parts of speech and literary devices by dividing them into two teams (I do boys and girls) and taking turns asking for a verb, a noun, an adverb, a pronoun, etc. No helping is allowed, and the first team to get whatever score I'm going for gets some sort of reward, usually a handful of jelly beans or something like that. I throw literary devices in with the parts of speech.

As I said, I don't spend a lot of time doing this. Most of the time, we're reading and writing, but our state tests are in two weeks, and we will be spending some time on this, so I'm sure they know it.