Creative Approaches to Teaching Grammar

Developing your students as writers and readers

Martin Illingworth, Nick Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138819283
• eBook ISBN: 9781317592792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creative Approaches to Teaching Grammar is an easily accessible, practical guide full of ideas to support teachers in making the learning of grammar a natural part of developing their students as writers and as readers. Written for those teaching years 5,6,7 and 8, the authors' approach concentrates on the individual needs of students rather than of a year group as a whole.

Split into two main sections, the first looks at creative ways of exploring grammar and includes more than forty ideas that can be implemented into the classroom. This section can be used as a quick resource or the whole sequence can be followed to ensure students are investigating, exploring and having fun with grammar.

The second section includes an extensive glossary of terms to develop a full understanding of grammar which can be used to audit your own competences and highlight areas for further development.

Creative ideas explored include:

• Being silly with grammar
• Favourite words
• Exploding sentences
• Writing for real audiences
• New punctuation marks and emoticons
• Sorting out confusing words
• Broadening active vocabulary
• Top ten spelling tips
• Flexing your vocabulary brain
• Redundancy in language

Creative Approaches to Teaching Grammar is a truly practical guide that is a must read for anyone teaching grammar to years 5,6,7 and 8. With plenty of ideas to implement into the classroom it encourages students to take ownership of their own learning and progress.

Ideas for teaching grammar

Idea 1

Questioning

Working to the assumption that a section on open and closed questions would be somewhat redundant here, let’s focus on how you and your students can ask and analyse questions to develop knowledge of grammar alongside the topic being studied.

Imagine that you are working on the topic of ‘chocolate’ for this half term. The topic could take you through the history of chocolate production and the geography of cocoa cultivation, through the marketing of chocolate products and the health effects of chocolate consumption. I’m fairly sure that it will be possible to work in some tasting either during the lessons or if not, during their preparation. Having undertaken the introduction to the topic you will inevitably ask the class some questions. Alongside your consideration of asking challenging, open questions, you could consider the impact that modal verbs will have on the discussion.

The modal verbs are: can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would. As a literacy objective throughout the unit of work, a clear focus on modal verbs will unlock thinking about both the topic and the methods of study. Having shared or co-created your objectives, you can pose a series of questions that use modal verbs to enable the students to consider their learning.

How can we understand the effects chocolate has on our bodies?
Can we use drama to learn about this topic?

We may use maps, how might they help our learning?

When shall we use internet research?
Shall we bring any experts in to the lessons?

Will we be able to find out who first ate chocolate?
What would be the best assessment method at the end of the unit?

This deliberate construction of questions employing modal verbs instigates a sense of enquiry in the students and a sense of ownership over their learning.

This focus on a sense of possibility can be enhanced when, later in the half term, the students are undertaking independent group work and you provide them with stimulus questions. Enabling your students to focus on how they operate as group, rather than simply the physical outcomes of their work, can be transformative. If the physical outcome is something along the lines of presenting an understanding of the journey a cocoa bean makes from plant to shop, the stimulus you pose could again draw on the wonders of modal verbs.

Could you ascribe roles that let everyone play to their strengths?

Might you design your own measures of success?

Should you look for any help or support from outside of your group?

Would it be helpful to see how other groups are working?

Having embedded modality as a feature of the unit of work, it will be time for the students to start to experiment with the creation of questions that feature modal verbs. This will create the opportunity for them to take the work far beyond the normal limits of discovering historical, geographical, physiological and marketable details of chocolate production. Each group should define the scope of their projects by setting themselves research questions using modal constructions. They should also pose questions to which they don’t know the answer.

Could we persuade the marketing team at X manufacturer to use our ideas to sell their products?

How might history help us to understand why chocolate is important to today’s consumers?

Should we care about where our chocolate comes from?

Would eating more or less chocolate make us healthier?

These big questions demand creative thinking and creative approaches to evaluating the knowledge that is acquired through research. The first question to be asked following the creation of a big research question is ‘What do we need to know to answer the question?’ Answering this question determines a methodology and from there roles can be assigned, learning can continue with a clear focus and modal verbs have underpinned some challenging investigative learning.

Idea 2

Sentences

A qualified mathematician may offer a more sophisticated analysis than this, though for our purposes it’s pretty much true to claim that there is an infinite number of sentences that can be crafted. It is probably the case that the previous sentence is unique – a collection of words that have never been put together in that order. Fortunately for budding writers in your class there are ways to classify sentences. An active knowledge of these classifications will enable them to consciously manipulate grammatical structures to create deliberate effects.

This section will cover the three types of sentence we have in English alongside active and passive forms. A helpful critical standpoint is to consider all sentences equal. Complex sentences are not intrinsically better than simple sentences; active constructions are not better than passive. With this perspective a writer can be free to choose the best construction for the purposes of their writing rather than feeling constrained by the need to demonstrate a range of sentences to satisfy a mark scheme. Freedom from constraint coupled with grammatical understanding will result in quality writing.

A quick recap:

• Simple sentences contain a single statement, as in Helen’s students thought that she was a bit crazy.

• Compound sentences contain more than one single statement, as in English is Tom’s favourite subject because he gets to write stories.

• Complex sentences contain a main clause coupled with one or more subordinate clauses, as in To fulfil her ambition to study Maths at university, Rubinder worked really hard at school, or The gardens are beautiful when the sun shines.

Writers need to choose the most appropriate construction to create the effect intended. Let’s look to a master of the craft, Philip Pullman. In his retelling of Snow White, Pullman opens the tale with a richly detailed complex sentence.¹

One winter’s day, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of the blackest ebony.

In the first subordinate clause the reader is given detail about time, in the second the weather and it is only in the third and main clause that we meet the subject of the sentence, ‘a queen’ with complementary detail about what she is doing and in the final subordinate clause more detail. This is expert storytelling through grammatical choices. The reader is rapidly brought in to the text-world through clauses that quickly zoom in from the broad to the precise and finally zooming back out to frame the queen in ebony. If you or your students rewrote this introduction as four simple sentences the pace and relationships between the elements would be lost. Later in the tale when the mirror tells the queen that Snow White is the fairest of all and she summons a huntsman to kill Snow White, Pullman writes,

The huntsman did as she ordered.

Here, the simple sentence is perfect. It captures the drama and grimness of the situation Snow White faces. This effect is redoubled as simple sentences are rare things in Pullman’s version of this tale. He seems to be reserving them for very special occasions. Later, following the huntsman’s failure to carry out his orders, the queen herself tries to kill Snow White. The dwarves return to find her nearly suffocated and release her.

Little by little she came back to life and told them what had happened.

This straightforward narrative sentence works as a compound construction; the reader is given sequential pieces of detail, the story moves on apace and the reader is led through the narrative.

With these examples, you can share this discussion with your students. Read them the story in full and tease out the way that Pullman manipulates grammatical constructions to create particular effects. Armed with increasing expertise, it’ll be time for the students to explore how they can develop the same skill.

For the purposes of this activity, it will be helpful for all children to be writing about the same, tightly limited, topic. Fairy stories provide good source material, as would a non-fiction piece such as a newspaper article. As ever, the ideas can be applied to any relevant topic you’re working on. You need to present a simplified structure for your young writers to build up in to narrative. An example might look like:

CHILD

WOODS

FEAR

ENCOUNTER

ESCAPE

It is important not to do any writing. At least, it’s important that children don’t start writing as individuals and that no one commits words to the page or screen until there’s been some talk and play. Depending on your students’ needs, either:

• Use the words in Table 2.1 to physically create some sentences. Give the words and punctuation marks out, one to each child, and the kids can put themselves in order to create sentences. Start with simple sentences, for instance six students stand in a row holding the words she walked along the path. If they stay in place, other students can join in. Two join the front of the sentence to create trembling, she walked along the path. You now have material for discussion and will be building an understanding that we need to play around with word order and sentence structure if we are to be in control of the texts we create. You could instruct trembling to stand after the or to move with the comma to stand after path. The discussions you lead will result in more playful writers.

OR

• In pairs and using the same bank of words but this time recreated smaller, guide the pupils to create some sentences in the same way as the activity above, only at their desks. You can stop the work regularly and ask students to explain what they are currently thinking, and how they are succeeding in creating new sentences by messing around with word order, conjunctions and subordinate clauses.

You can, of course, use both ideas alongside one another. The most important development of either activity is the concept of rehearsal. Stopping to talk, think, play with word order before committing a sentence to the page is absolutely vital. You should be expecting to see children stopping to look at the ceiling, out of the window or close their eyes for a moment to think. Encourage it. Slowing down the writing process at the developmental stage means that your students will become highly competent and the skills they develop will become more immediate with practice. This is good old-fashioned quality over quantity.

Table 2.1 Making sentences

trembling	she	walked	along
flowers	he	ran	through
red	path	laughed	between
green	woods	the	a
white	trees	the	a
black	was	the	a
there	because	wild	light
rose	when	good	dark
snow	sun	rabbit	for
white	if	that	were
;	;	?	!
.	.	.	.
,	,	,	,

Note

1 Philip Pullman, Grimm Tales: For Young and Old, Penguin Classics, London (2013).

Idea 3

Marginal commentaries

Gauging the current capacities of a child in terms of their language development can be difficult. Devising activities to make explicit where they are ‘up to’ will mean that you can design appropriate steps forward. When students come to you they will have all sorts of capabilities and different ways of perceiving what they can and can’t do. You need to get a handle on this prior lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Teachers of Key Stage 2
• Teachers of Key Stage 3
• The problem with transition
• Auditing your knowledge
• Levels of understanding in testing
• Relevance
• Ideas for teaching grammar
• Glossary
• Index