The one about how to create interesting grammar lessons

Most people (including teachers!) hear the word “grammar” and start to cringe. It can be fairly dull and boring, and it seems like you’re teaching these kids the same stuff over and over. Plus, you teach all these “rules” and then you teach about all of these exceptions to the rules, because, well, the English language is quite bizarre.

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So how can we make it better? Here are some tried and true ways to get your students excited for grammar:

1. Use picture books to introduce your grammar ideas. A couple of my favorites:

For Punctuation Takes a Vacation, I like to use the letter in the book as an activity for students to correct the punctuation.

Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What Is an Adjective? (Words Are Categorical) is an example of a Brian Cleary book. He has a huge set of educational picture books for each part of speech and also for figurative language and some math topics- the illustrations and writing is amazing!

2. Word sorts to have students discover the rules. I love using sorts of all kinds. In grammar, it’s a great way to have students apply rules they’ve already learned. Sorts can challenge their brains in a different way. Give students sets of singular nouns and having them sort by the plural endings. Hand them a mixture of nouns, verbs, and adjectives and see if they can figure out to sort the words by part of speech. Having a challenge gets them thinking in different ways, especially if you don’t tell them exactly what the categories are. 😉

3. Switch up practice by color coding or cutting up sentence strips. Drill and kill is old, my friends. Does anyone even remember how to diagram sentences anymore? (Me! I do!…but probably very few of you. I can guarantee my husband doesn’t…anyway…) We need to still be able to assess our students throughout their grammar practice without always using the same old worksheets. We used some color coding during our The Night I Followed the Dog unit (see more about that here). Students can easily highlight every noun and verb. Use a story they’re reading and copy a few sentences or even a page, identifying all of the adjectives on the page.
The picture above shows an example of some sentence strips that we performed “surgery” on by separating the subject and predicate. I’ve also had students write out entire sentences and then we “diagrammed” the sentences by separating them word by word and categorizing the parts of speech. We made a huge class display of all of our words. This was so amazing to do towards the latter part of the school year because my kiddos could really see how many different parts of speech they learned.

4. An oldie, but a goodie- Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition)! These jams are silly and fun for the kids to sing along to. You can search YouTube or Teacher Tube for free versions, but I kept having problems with how fuzzy the videos were, so I broke down and bought the DVD. Great news for you- all of the episodes are now available FOR FREE on ABC- find the episode guide here and here’s The Tale of Mr. Morton (Subject and Predicate)– which is always my kiddo’s favorite!

5. Get into interactive notebooks: Students love the cutting, pasting, and writing in their notebooks. I don’t use INBs for everything, but I’ve learned that they’re crucial to my grammar lessons. Students get the opportunity to practice and reinforce their learning in the notebooks. I try to use similar templates over and over to simplify the process and have more time focused on the learning, rather than getting hung up on teaching students how to cut each piece. INBs give students the chance to practice in class, and also allows them to quiz themselves in school or at home, using sorts and flipbooks in their notebooks.