Grammar does matter!

Fresh off the heels of a regional PD our schools literacy team returned with lots of information about the teaching of grammar in a primary classroom.

At first we closely looked at the Ausvels curriculum to familiarize ourselves with all the grammar components of the curriculum. In teams we had a healthy discussion on what needed to be taught at each level.

The team also showed us a few ideas for introducing grammar realted topics to our classes and ways to improve their sentence writing.

We talked about subjects, verbs, simple sentences, complex sentences. Please check out the presentation below for details on what was covered in the session.

Shepparton Grammar PPT by gjdarma

The team showed us quite a few classroom games and activities that re-inforce the teaching of grammar in the primary classroom. Some of these included the (Break- sentence) down language experience where you think of a thing like a person or an animal then write a small list of adjectives, places or settings and actions. The students can then play around with these words to create sentences. The example we used in the staff room was frogs.

Adjectives- Croaky, jumpy, smelly, large

Settings- Swamp, pond, lilypad

Actions- Vigorously,

Obviously your list you create would be dependent on the age group of your students and their abilities. This activity could be varied in a number of ways.

Another activity we had was ABC writing. This is to get students thinking about different ways of starting their sentences. We took a familiar fairy tale, like Cinderella and had to then re-write the fairy tale starting each sentence with a new letter of the alphabet. For example the first word of the first sentence started with an a, nest sentence b and so on. I think this a clever idea and something I will be using in my classroom.

A lot of the ideas in the PD came from this document a language strategies document. Check it out below: