You can choose mentor sentences from what you’re reading as a class, or you can choose from books the students are interested in by using familiar texts for the mentor sentences you study, grammar will not be isolated. Using grammar as a springboard is a good way to showcase how the craft of writing matters. Writing craft matters tremendously, and it’s something students can appreciate. But we don’t always take the time to look at the craft involved that allows the writer to make you feel something. Usually, when we teach literature we teach the BIG stuff: the overall plot, symbolism, character development, and literary terms. Showcase great literature, and relate it to grammar concepts. With that in mind, here are my 3 biggest tips for how to teach parts of speech in high school, so that students become people who like to write and are not afraid of grammar. While students can give me basic definitions of grammar terms, their writing does not showcase a robust understanding of how strong nouns, vivid verbs, and well-placed modifiers can bring a bland sentence to life. A few can tell me the definition of an adverb (at least in part). Most of them can tell me what an adjective is. It’s a sobering article about the pitfalls of isolated grammar instruction.Īt the beginning of the year, I find that my students can easily tell me what a noun and a verb are. Grammar instruction must be integrated into writing practice, or it produces students who are afraid of writing because they might “get it wrong.” If you want to read more on this subject, check out this article from The Atlantic: The Wrong Way To Teach Grammar. What I found was that many high school students have a spotty understanding of grammar concepts in general, but an even bigger problem is that they don’t relate their knowledge of grammar to the actual practice of writing. However, I soon realized that this is not the case. When I started teaching I naively assumed most high school students were pretty solid on their understanding of parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
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