Grammar and Language

Up until this year, when North Carolina (along with almost all the other 50 states) switched to the Common Core State Standards, we didn't do much with grammar and language.  It wasn't stated that it had to be taught so from what I observed, most teachers might have worked it in during writing some but overall, it was mostly ignored.

There are several schools of thought on teaching grammar and language - usually divided into the explicit instruction/drill camp and the teach it in context method.  That's simplifying it some for sure but overall, that was my experience.

I, for one, see much benefit in teaching proper grammar and mechanics explicitly. I also believe in teaching it in context. I suppose this is similar to how literacy instruction has swung from phonics to whole language and then back again to the middle, the land of balanced literacy. I see math in a similar manner - I teach most of our math curriculum conceptually because I believe it is better instruction but there are some things we just have to memorize, like the multiplication tables.

I have some to view grammar and language instruction in the same way - I need a balance of teaching it in the context of writing and I also need some explicit instruction and drills. Some students will naturally pick up on proper grammar and mechanics through their reading - good, voracious readers also tend to be better writers. However, there are also students who just do not ever seem to learn it without explicit instruction and to me, it showed quite a bit when looking at issues involving punctuation, run-on sentences, and spelling and it wasn't naturally getting better with age and writing maturity. I think that one only has to look at how many adults confuse common homophones like they're, there, and their and lose/loose (a personal pet peeve) to see that some things we just have to learn at some point.

So, this quarter I have really buckled down and created a plan for specific grammar and language instruction. Yes, I should've been doing this all year but it's the first year of a brand new curriculum so to say things have been difficult is an understatement. We're not just figuring out new material but also how to teach it - doing both at once is not easy.

Nevertheless, I decided there was no time like the present and created a quarter-long plan with two weeks for each topic I was able to group objectives into. It ended up looking like this:

Weeks 1 & 2: Homophones (focused on the major ones like they're, there, and their)
Weeks 3 & 4: Punctuation & capitalization (specifically apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks but I'm going to review the basics as well since we still don't capitalize all proper nouns)
Weeks 5 & 6: Complete sentences (this is a big issues with my students. two weeks may seem like overkill but we are going to learn what a complete sentence is)
Weeks 7 & 8: formal versus informal English (not as big of an issue as last year but worth revisiting), relative pronouns and adverbs, progressive verb tense, and prepositional phrases.

During week 9 we have our end of quarter bench mark testing and it's only 3 days long. We covered parts of speech during the first quarter and I'm also mixing in idioms, adages and other figurative language as part of their morning work along with practice correcting sentences for grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

Each two weeks I'm planning short 5-10 minute lessons on the topics and they have practice to complete on days they're not on Spelling City (which is every other day - 5 days of Spelling City per two weeks and 5 days of grammar practice). Practice gets turned in and checked but not graded. 

Every other week they'll have a short quiz on the topics from the prior two weeks that will be graded. They just took their homophones quiz today and a quick glance showed most look pretty good. I can easily pull the ones that are still confusing some words and keep practicing.

I actually enjoy teaching grammar and I see it as vitally important in becoming a good writer so I'm enjoying it so far and my students seem to be taking to it well.  I tell my students that even if you have the best ideas in the world, if your reader is constantly distracted by grammar issues or can't figure out what you're trying to say because of spelling, it doesn't really matter very much. I'm not saying everything has to be perfect but everyone should master the basics. 

We'll see how it goes - I'm interested to see if our efforts will pay off in improved writing.