Teaching Grammar

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.

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!