In today’s blog post we’ll delve into the last of the 3 Keys to Grammar Success . . . Relevance, Not Routine. But first . . .
Grammar Key Replay
If this is your first time on the blog, you might want to read the last two blog posts before continuing on. Grammar Key #1: Integrate, Don’t Isolate and Grammar Key #2: Mimic & Manipulate, Don’t Memorize.
If you’ve already read the two blog posts listed above, then you know that your grammar lessons should be integrated into both reading and writing time. In other words, every text you READ can teach you something that helps improve every text you WRITE.
Not only that, but grammar taught in isolation (especially grammar practiced only through worksheets) is pretty much doomed to fail in the long run because there’s no connection to a real writing task. Likewise, memorizing terms and rules probably won’t improve student writing for the vast majority of your kids either. Instead, students need time to mimic mentor sentences and to manipulate sentences through thoughtful sentence combining activities. After all, grammar is a stylistic tool, aka a series of different choices, in an author’s toolbag.
Which brings us to . . .
Table of Contents
Grammar Key #3: Relevance, Not Routine
Despite our best efforts when teaching grammar, some kids just aren’t all that interested. They don’t see the point in knowing where a comma goes when they have tech tools like Grammarly that can identify the mistakes and autocorrect their writing for them. Which means that we writing teachers have to shift with the times. Here’s how.
Start with the Writing Task in Mind
In my experience, when it comes to curriculum and pacing guides, writing always seems to be an afterthought. It’s clear that the focus of most prepackaged ELA programs is purely on the reading tasks. Writing tasks and grammar lessons tend to be haphazardly addressed, or worse, awkwardly shoehorned in, which makes it far too easy for teachers to cut these tasks out when time runs short.
And time ALWAYS runs short.
Plus, even short daily grammar routines, such as correcting sentence errors, don’t give a good return on our time when the skills are usually disjointed and completely disconnected from any writing the students may do. Which makes the daily routine useless and easily forgettable.
Instead, try this: Plan your ELA unit around a specific writing task. WHAT do you want your kids to write? WHO will they write to or for?
Maybe for this next unit I want my students to write a travel blog about a raindrop’s journey through the water cycle. We can share our writing with the second graders on campus. This lets me hit a science standard alongside my reading and writing standards.
Select Your Grammar & Writing Skills
Now that you have a writing task and audience in mind, take a moment to consider what writing and grammar skills your students will need in order to successfully accomplish this writing piece. Instead of trying to tackle every single grammar standard, narrow your scope. What 1-2 grammar skills make the most sense to teach right now? Look for skills that the majority of your students are ready to tackle.
For our water cycle travel blog, I might select the following skills . . .
| Writing Skills | Grammar Skills |
| 1st person versus 3rd person POV Sensory Details | Verb tenses Complex sentences |
If I want my students to write narrative stories, we’d spend time analyzing how to write and punctuate dialogue. For biographies, we’d spend time learning to write appositive phrases.
No matter what grammar skills you select, they have to make sense for the writing type that you will be doing, AND they have to be skills that most of your kids haven’t mastered yet.
Select Texts & Mentor Sentences
Once you’ve decided which grammar skills you want to focus on, look for texts that are written in the same style and include the same grammar skills. During this lesson planning stage, I’d recommend looking for a variety of texts that can help build content knowledge as well as texts that are similar to the type of text I want my students to write themselves.
Take a few moments to review the texts you’ve pulled. Are there any mentor sentences that you can highlight and analyze with your students? If I want to focus on verb tenses and complex sentences, I might pull out a complex sentence written in past tense. As a class we can identify what makes it past tense, then play with rewriting the sentence in present or future tense.
Then, it’s time for the kids to mimic this rich sentence structure and use it in their own writing.
Recap
By planning with the end writing product in mind, the grammar skills you teach will become much more relevant and timely for the kids to learn. We can discuss these grammar skills during our reading, during our drafting, and during our revision time. That gives us multiple times interacting with each grammar skill and applying it to an authentic writing piece for a real audience. That alone will make your grammar lessons more relevant and meaningful.
“Students will respond to punctuation lessons when the content is relevant – when they need the information to strengthen their writing” from What Works in Grammar Instruction (page 14).
Your Mission:
Plan out or backwards map your next writing assignment. Consider the following:
- What type of writing piece will your students do?
- What grammar skills make the most sense to teach during this unit?
- What texts can your students read to gain content knowledge? What mentor texts can your students read to learn about this particular style or form of writing?
- Find 3 or more mentor sentences that you want to analyze and mimic.
Want More?
If you’re an AVID school or looking for an easy way for students to take notes during grammar lessons, you might like this Grammar Note-Taking Booklet Bundle. It’s really helping my writing intervention students because it’s a handy guide that they can refer back to when reading, writing, or while playing one of my writing games.
