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    Ela100 3 English Comingtogripswithgrammar

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    Teacher and author, robyn english, has worked with primary students for a year. She believes that verbs are fascinating, complex and the essence of good writing. She shares some activities and thoughts to encourage other teachers to have a play around with verbs to see how they can improve writing.

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    Ela100 3 English Comingtogripswithgrammar

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    api-305277394
    52 views3 pages
    Teacher and author, robyn english, has worked with primary students for a year. She believes that verbs are fascinating, complex and the essence of good writing. She shares some activities and thoughts to encourage other teachers to have a play around with verbs to see how they can improve writing.

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    ela100 3 english comingtogripswithgrammar

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    Teacher and author, robyn english, has worked with primary students for a year. She believes that verbs are fascinating, complex and the essence of good writing. She shares some activities and thoughts to encourage other teachers to have a play around with verbs to see how they can improve writing.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    52 views3 pages

    Ela100 3 English Comingtogripswithgrammar

    Uploaded by

    api-305277394
    Teacher and author, robyn english, has worked with primary students for a year. She believes that verbs are fascinating, complex and the essence of good writing. She shares some activities and thoughts to encourage other teachers to have a play around with verbs to see how they can improve writing.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    Coming to

    grips with grammar

    Robyn English

    n setting out to design a series of simple


    grammar lessons for primary students, I
    discovered that there is much more to a sentence
    than I had expected. The original plan was to work
    with a grade of senior primary students once a week
    and take them through the basics of identifying the
    parts of a sentence. We quickly discovered that verbs
    are fascinating, complex and, I believe, the essence of
    good writing.
    Over a year later, after working with classes
    across the primary school, I have cemented this
    belief and consider the verb to be vastly under-rated.
    I decided to share some activities and thoughts to
    encourage other teachers to have a play around
    with verbs to see how they can improve writing.
    A natural progression of this study is to use the
    activities for developing inferential comprehension
    skills.

    devises a sentence
    which they each
    write down. This
    is very supportive
    for the weaker
    students and involves
    everyone. It can also
    be very amusing,
    for example the
    challenges involved
    with combining the
    ant with squelched
    and the baby with
    galloped. The pair
    decide this first sentence together but then each
    works alone to develop the short story that follows.
    The variations from a common start are fascinating
    and the students love to read their work to the class.

    Colour coding to keep it simple

    Lucky dip

    As verbs are often about action, there is great scope


    for including drama in these lessons. The sentence,
    The boy walked across the room is written on the board
    and an actor is chosen to model the boy walking
    across the room. This is a very neutral action but see
    what happens when the word walked is erased and
    replaced with stormed or strode or staggered or
    darted. This makes for a perfect segue to discuss
    inferential comprehension and consider the change
    to our visualisation when each of these different
    verbs is used. Why would a boy storm across
    a room? Where is this boy striding to in such a
    confident manner? And it is here that you will find

    PR IM AR Y

    A game that all ages love is to lucky-dip words


    that must be cemented together in a sentence. One
    activity that works well is to have students pair
    up with one lucky-dipping the noun while the
    other takes a verb. The pair then talks together and

    Actions speak louder than words

    PR AC TIC ALLY

    Following a colour coding guide provided by Beryl


    Exley at the ALEA National conference in 2012, I
    went into the classroom armed with a red, green
    and blue whiteboard marker. I wrote the sentence,
    The boy (in red for the noun group) walked (in
    green for the verb group) across the room (in blue
    for the circumstance of the sentence). I wrote a few
    similar sentences and it was not long before the
    group had cracked my colour coding grammar
    rule. They worked out that the red indicated who
    doing, the green represented what doing and the
    blue was the where, when, why or how doing. I had
    picked up these terms from a colourful semantics
    professional learning session, run by a speech
    pathologist. From there on, I interchanged terms
    verb with what doing, noun with who doing
    and circumstances with where, why, when or how
    doing. I noticed that different students preferred
    to use the different terms which did not worry me
    at all. My aim was to get the students talking about
    language and, although I wanted the discussion to
    be grammatically accurate, I was not going to get
    hung up on teaching a specific set vocabulary.

    the students with limited vocabulary who, although


    they can decode the word, cannot demonstrate or
    explain the context that is implied by its use.

    VOLU M E 19

    NU M B ER 3

    OCT OB ER

    2 014

    Picture books to the rescue

    My favourite Christmas present last year was the


    ALEA membership gift Playing with Grammar by
    Beryl Exley and Lisa Kervin. I read it from cover to
    cover and imagined all the ways I would use the
    great ideas with my classes. I browsed the school
    library, my bookshelves and on-line book shops
    to find the recommended books. One particularly
    successful activity with a year three class, related to
    Rosies Walk by Pat Hutchins. I created a strip that
    contained the entire text of Rosies Walk in one long
    ribbon. The class quickly identified the words that
    seemed to belong together: over, under, through,
    etc. We talked about these prepositions and as a
    class innovated on the text to write the story of
    Princess Stephanies walk around the castle. The
    students couldnt get back to their tables quickly
    enough when invited to create their own texts. One
    weaker student wrote a lovely piece about a snake
    slithering through a jungle while a really strong
    writer described the journey of a piece of chocolate
    through the body (Ill leave the ending up to your
    imagination!)

    Pardon my verbosity
    My discussions with primary school teachers
    suggest that many are quite worried about their
    expertise and capacity to teach grammar. When I

    discuss this in more detail with them, they admit


    that they are never quite sure they are teaching the
    right terminology. I dont hold myself up as an
    expert and I, too, went to primary school in the times
    when grammar was not taught explicitly. I didnt
    study a second language at high school so didnt
    learn to parse a sentence in that context either. But
    grammar is fun when you keep it simple, use games
    and well-loved picture books and give students
    many opportunities to innovate on the texts. And if
    I were to end with one hot tip for teaching grammar
    it would be: start with a sentence and get stuck into
    verbs.
    References
    Exley, B., & Kervin, L. (2013). Playing with grammar in the
    early years. Norwood, SA: Australian Literacy Educators
    Association.
    Hutchins, P. (1968). Rosies Walk. London, UK: Red Fox
    Picture Books.

    Robyn English is the assistant principal of Boroondara Park


    Primary in Melbourne and takes any chance she has to get into the
    classroom to teach her favourite subject English. Robyn is the
    reviews editor for Practically Primary and is an active member of
    the Melbourne local council of ALEA. (Contact: english.robyn.s@
    edumail.vic.gov.au)

    Copyright of Practically Primary is the property of Australian Literacy Educators' Association


    and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without
    the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
    email articles for individual use.

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