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Teaching Grammar and Parts of Speech

June 13, 2018 By Ashleigh 4 Comments

Strategies for Teaching Grammar to Upper Elementary Students text with a smiling Black woman holding a piece of chalk to a large green chalkboard.

Grammar appears to be a subject that teachers either love or hate to teach. There are also a lot of polarizing opinions on how to teach grammar. Some say it should only be taught in the context of writing instruction, while others believe in a daily grammar block. The purpose of this post is not to debate an all or nothing approach. Instead, I’ll share what I’ve found effective for teaching grammar in my classroom. I think we all can agree that grammar should not be an afterthought to instruction but an intentional part of our day. Before sharing about teaching grammar, I’d like to share my pacing of my grammar units. I only have four grammar units, but those four units teach all of my language or grammar standards.

In the first unit, I focus on nouns: identifying, singular and plural, common and proper, possessive, and abstract nouns. In the second unit I primarily teach verbs: identifying, linking verbs, helping verbs, verb tense, and subject-verb agreement. The third unit focuses on identifying and using adjectives and adverbs. The fourth unit includes everything else: complete sentences, compound and complex sentences, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, and commas. I do have a fifth unit on the pacing guide, but during that unit I’m reviewing the first four units.

I use about 10-15 minutes of my writing workshop block to teach grammar. That isn’t a lot of time for the massive amount of standards I need to teach during this time, but I do squeeze in some review here and there.  Most of my grammar instruction is centered around Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined. It’s by far my favorite professional development for teaching grammar in the writing workshop framework.
Below are five of my favorite strategies to teach grammar to my upper elementary students. Of course, I don’t try to use each of these everyday. Instead a use a combination of the strategies below to ensure I teach all grammar standards in a timely manner that will allow my students to apply those skills to their writing.
It’s not always easy, but grammar doesn’t have to be boring. I introduce new concepts with engaging activities, rather than worksheets. These lessons may take a bit longer than a more basic worksheet, but it allows students to gain a deeper understanding on the concepts, which saves me time in the long run. Students may complete a plural noun sort, or they may design their own noun anchor chart by cutting out examples of nouns that represent a person, place, or thing.
I make sure the activities allow students to DO something, rather than be passive learners. I use the activities from my noun, verb, adjective/adverb, and sentence grammar units.
Over the years worksheets have gotten a bad rap. While I’m certainly not a drill and kill teacher, I do think a high quality worksheet can be useful for students. We have to pay attention to both the quantity and quality of anything we assign our students. I like to follow a learning activity with an application worksheet the following day. This gives students important extra practice with the skill they are learning. I make sure that the worksheets are fun for students and easy to prep for me. I design worksheets that require more higher order thinking skills, rather than rote memorization. The worksheets I use are also from my grammar units, which saves me from having to continuously looking for complimentary lessons.
I do not assign a grade for these worksheets. Instead, I use them as a formative assessment to see which students may need additional small group instruction or practice.
What student doesn’t like games?! I incorporate grammar games into my language arts centers. I don’t try to use my writing workshop time for every activity in my grammar units. Instead, I squeeze in a little review into my language arts centers. I have students use task cards and game boards to practice the concepts we are currently studying. I use the games and task cards included in my grammar units for these activities.
In addition, I have a set of monthly spiral review task cards that are a cumulative review of everything I have taught up to that point in the year. I have them for third grade, but I haven’t made them for fourth grade yet.
You can read more about organizing task cards and games in this blog post. I tried to include a lot of pictures and examples, because I know task card organization can be tricky.

Consistent review is essential for students to retain what they’ve learned and to be able to retrieve that information from their long term memories. I incorporate spiral review through my homework and morning work. While I don’t send home much homework, the homework I do send home is a spiral review. I don’t like to assign homework on something my students just learned in class, because many students will need reteaching. Instead, I use homework to have my students practice skills they have already learned.

This picture shows my Third Grade Spiral Language Review. This reviews the third grade Common Core Standards language skills through a spiral review worksheet. There is one worksheet for each week of the school year for a total of 36 worksheets.

I also made a 4th grade version of the spiral language review. The skills reviewed include: Relative Pronouns, Relative Adverbs, Progressive Verbs, Modal Auxiliaries, Adjectives (ordering adjectives and identifying adjectives), Prepositional Phrases, Punctuation, Capitalization, Combining Sentences, Spelling, and Homophones.

Morning work is another great way to incorporate spiral review. I have Third Grade Language Arts Morning Work that is organized by the days of the week with different activities Monday through Friday. This is a great way to reinforce and review all of those tricky grammar and vocabulary skills. There are 36 weeks worth of questions, and each week is broken into sections to keep the review short and sweet. I go over this with my students every morning, and I have students correct their work with a pen.

This is my Fourth Grade Language Arts Morning Work, which is set up in a similar format to geared toward fourth grade standards.

I recognize that some of the skills are tricky for students at the beginning of the year, so I often have students only complete part of the day’s problems until they are ready to complete all parts of the assignment. It usually only takes a week or two for students to be able to complete their morning work in a timely manner.

I set aside a few minutes before and after our traditional writing workshop time to focus on these grammar skills. In addition to the activities, worksheets, and spiral review, I teach the grammar skills we are focusing on through mentor sentences. These are not “fix all” sentences with a variety of errors. Instead, each sentence will reflect the grammar concept of the week. I have students analyze these mentor sentences and discuss what is right or wrong with the sentences and why the sentences are correct. It’s beneficial for students to learn from well written sentences, so they know what a good sentence looks like. To use mentor sentences for your grammar instruction, you should first find well-written sentences to model effective sentence structure and grammar. Present the mentor sentences and look for patterns within those sentences. Have students practice writing their own examples of the mentor sentence and highlight examples of the particular skill you are teaching in their own writing.
I’ve included mentor sentence examples in my writing units. I wrote the sentences to go along with the mini lessons on the writing strategy taught for that day AND the grammar skill taught within that unit. You can learn more about my writing units here.
After I teach a skill, I expect students to apply that skill in writing workshop. When I conference with students for editing, I try to primarily focus on what students have already learned. If a student is ready for acceleration, I go ahead and teach in a one on one basis, but in general I try not to overwhelm students. Otherwise, the conference turns into me telling students what to do, but the students have no idea why they are making the corrections.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or needs for teaching grammar!

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I’m Ashleigh!

Hi everyone! I'm Ashleigh, and I'm thrilled that you're here! I'm currently working on my 11th year teaching, which absolutely blows my mind! I can't believe I've been teaching for one-third of my life! … Read More…

Comments

  1. Mary Ann says

    June 15, 2018 at 9:58 AM

    Ashleigh, is this the Parts of Speech bundle in your TPT store? I truly enjoyed all of the lessons you include. I will be teaching third grade next year and your work looks very hlepful to me! Thank you.

    Reply
    • Ashleigh says

      June 19, 2018 at 9:56 PM

      Yes! You can find it here.

      Reply
  2. Christine says

    July 16, 2018 at 11:46 AM

    Ashleigh I love your materials and appreciate the effort you put into all that you create. Would you PLEASE consider creating your grammar materials for fifth grade? Many of your products that I’ve purchased are based on third/fourth grade. I have adapted many of them for fifth, but I am hoping that you will consider creating them for fifth

    Reply
    • Christine says

      July 25, 2018 at 7:35 AM

      Fifth grade grammar Pretty please

      Reply

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