Teaching grammar

[Jennitan]

Each week I dread teaching basic grammar. Any suggestions for spicing up grammar lessons?

[Unregistered]

It'd help if I had a better idea of the age group that you're working with. A good overall suggestion, regardless of the students' age, is to make the work humourous. Find the nouns of the funny sentence or write a boring/normal sentence and invite them to add adjectives that'd make the sentence funnier. Of course, this idea can be varied depending on the grammatical concept you want to introduce.

Unfortunately, it can be tough to spice up grammar but your students pick up on your attitude too. If you approach grammar as a drag/horror to teach, they'll likely feel the same way. You end up in a lose/lose situation with your class. I'm referring to a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Remember, learning cannot always be fun and entertaining. Students need to realise that sometimes, learning is simply learning, acquiring and applying useful knowledge.

Best of luck!

[Unregistered]

Try MadLibs

[Unregistered]

Mad libs work great with any age level. Have students use magazines to paste pictures of nouns-person,place, and things. This will be a great thing to display at any age level.

[Unregistered]

I teach in Resource Room (grades 7 & 8). A friend of mine introduced me to a book called "Grammar with a Giggle." There are 100 sentences with assorted spelling, punctuation, capitalization, word usage, etc. errors. When you put all the sentences together, it's a story. We do one everyday and I change the errors in the sentences to reflect my students' weak areas or to coincide with something else that we are doing in class.

The publisher is Maupin House but I cannot remember the author's name. You can get it through Amazon or through Maupin House. There is a version for elementary and one for high school too.

Good luck!

[Unregistered]

Try the old subject / verb/ object or other type of sentence structure, but without real words. Like "The glinnest flurb rickled the tuniest snerk fetly."

Shows verb structures, adjective structures, noun structures,etc. No one who knows English can help but find that the verb in this sentence is rickled.
Makes the kids think and the structure of the English language apparent. I don't know what fetly means, but I do know that that snerk was rickled in that manner!

[alanfoo]

teaching grammar using traditional methods are always dull.

Using current multimedia software maybe too difficult for most teachers.

use something in between.

check it out at www.visualgram.com

maybe that simple but practical solution is useful to you

regards
alan

[Unregistered]

Here are a few ideas that have worked for me.

Auxiliary verbs
With younger students, I like to teach the present and past continuous tenses using "human sentences". I call for volunteers to "become" a word in a sentence, and I give them a large card with the word on it. The class is invited to read the sentence. Then I send the auxiliary verb on a vacation and have the children read the sentence again. I then ask the auxiliary verb to come back and help the sentence. This activity helps the students to understand the importance of auxiliary verbs.

Commas

I've become quite fed up of teaching the many uses of commas, so last year I tried this approach. I divided the students into groups and gave each group a sentence in which a comma was used. I then asked the students to use that sentence to try and figure out the rule that governs it. Each group presents its findings and we clean up their rules as necessary and then the students write the note on commas that has been generated by their peers.

Finally, I sometimes use television to teach grammar. Have the students watch a film clip or television show, and then ask questions that will help students to practice the use of the conditional tense. For example, "If you were Raven, how would you have handled that situation differently" Student's reply: "If I were Raven, I would have taken some more time to work out my plan."
Hope these ideas help.

[Unregistered]

I have used several different activities for making grammar more interesting.
First, this past year when we got to the unit on punctuation, that the students have every year, I had my 6-8 graders work individually or in pairs to teach the lesson to the class. I drew names, and they selected the lesson they wanted to teach. After all topics were selected, I randomly drew names again to see who had to go first. They were to teach the lesson, have some sort of assessment AND provide questions and answers (10) to be used on the unit test. I graded the students on their presentation and whether they had the required information. They loved doing it and wanted to do it with another unit later.

Secondly, I introduce each new topic with "Grammar Rock" video from the School House Rock collection. It is a jazzy way to get started.

Good luck.

[Unregistered]

I have been taught in teaching traditional grammar in the university and learned to teach it.

I am just curious if all of you guys have encountered Pedagogical, Systemic Functional and Functional Grammar.

Have you ever used this in your class? What implication/s would these terminologies help us in teaching English?

[peachyteacher]

I use "Giggles in the Middle" by Jane Bell Kiester. Each day my students know to get their notebooks out and copy the "Caught'Ya" of the day as a "Do Now" activity. I have it on my laptop in a powerpoint slide and it's projected onto the board. I walk around and try to "catch" them making errors. After the first two weeks or so, students are begging me to check their work and show me how many they got right. After about 8 minutes or so, depending on the length of the "Caught'Ya", I pick sticks (each student has their name on a stick) and they can come to the board and make the corrections. Every time they make an accurate correction, they earn a Noble ticket (our school's positive behavior reward $$) for which they can cash in for a snack later on or put in the monthly raffle. It pays to pay attention to the grammar rules and my kids have shown tremendous growth since the beginning of the year. A huge portion of my students are ESL students, so when one of my ESL students can explain the reasons why you begin a new paragraph or tell me which words signal dialogue, it is very rewarding. Also, within each "Caught'Ya" are vocabulary words. I have the students use context clues to guess the meaning, then they check it against the dictionary definition. Now every time we read something that has one of the vocabulary words, they point it out. They also point out grammar/spelling/punctuation errors in ads, flyers, etc. When they write, I ask them to swap their papers with a partner and do a "Caught'Ya." I've taught ELA for 14 years, but only used "Giggles in the Middle" the last two years. It has worked for my kids, and is easily adaptable to fit the needs of your students. It's a great way to teach the parts of speech, punctuation, spelling and vocabulary.

[Unregistered]

www.visualgram.com
maybe that simple but practical solution is useful to you


Did I miss something or did I just get snookered? I went to the site, found a few math links and a few advertisement.

[Unregistered]

[QUOTE=advertisement.[/QUOTE]

Sorry, typo, "advertisements."