Rethinking Grammar in the Upper-Elementary Classroom

Teaching grammar is hard! I taught it for years, wondering why my students never carried the cognitive load. We’d go over and over concepts, and nothing would stick. I’d devise every excuse not to teach grammar because I was so frustrated and bursting with teacher guilt. It wasn’t until I realized that grammar should NOT be taught in isolation that my teaching practice began to change.

#1 Ditch the Worksheets

Giving students worksheets doesn’t teach them how to use grammar in real-life situations or even their writing. Worksheets teach students a concept without showing them the purpose of it. For example, a worksheet might teach a student what a noun is, but it doesn’t teach them how to use it or why it is essential. Students should use nouns in sentences, find nouns in mentor texts, and build meaningful sentences that show why they are important. Next time you are tempted to teach from a worksheet, open up whatever story your class is reading and find an example of the grammar skill you are teaching. Teach it from the author’s own words, and watch your students’ understanding grow.

#2 Make it Meaningful

Making grammar meaningful sounds like a daunting task. By changing your approach, you can make grammar have more purpose. Last week, we reviewed nouns, adjectives, and verbs in my third-grade classroom. Instead of handing out a worksheet, I had my students find the parts of speech in the chapters we just read. (It doesn’t matter what book it is because every sentence has a noun.) My students wrote the nouns in their notebooks while comparing their answers in table groups. These were some of my class’s comments: Is this word a noun? I don’t remember what a noun is; can you remind me? I found that noun, too! Do you know what this noun means? Are you sure that’s a noun?

#3 Play with it

Words are puzzle pieces that make meaningful thoughts. Why not play with them!?! Students love to play, and they learn more while playing! Write any sentence on the board – the sillier, the better! Erase a verb. Change it to another one. Read the sentence. Then erase the noun and change it, too! Repeat this, letting your students rewrite the sentence! Laugh with them while they are rereading with you, and find other words that would make the sentence even sillier. Act like words are playthings, and sentences are your playground.

Write on your whiteboard:

The cat is fat.

Change the noun.

The pig is fat.

Add a word to describe a pig. What kind of words are you adding?

The spotted pig is fat.

Add another word.

The spotted pig is very fat.

Add more and draw a picture.

The spotted pig is so fat he couldn’t walk.

Laugh with your students about the silly nouns, adjectives, and prepositions. Use these big words while you are laughing! Encourage them to add even sillier adjectives. Let them lead where the sentence is going! Trust me, laughing will make you feel better, and your students will remember that an adjective describes a noun, and a proposition gives you more information. Even your struggling students will remember that words are fun and they can make silly sentences!