Gretchen,
     I'm responding to your suggestion about the second ATEG listserv for
elementary and middle school teachers.  Although I and I am sure others who
teach at the college level want very much to hear from such teachers about
teaching grammar in those grades, I can also imagine that 1-6 teachers would
feel more comfortable discussing grammar on a listserv with approximate
peers.  (Professors can always join both listservs if they want to.)  If you
would like me to pursue this (I'm not exactly sure what's involved but I'll
find out), get in touch with me at [log in to unmask] so we can discuss
a few things.
      Also, keep in mind the Tips for Teaching Grammar section of the new
ateg.org website.  This Tips section is just beginning, but my hope is that
eventually it will include Tips for teachers at all levels.  I am about to
tap some people who were vocal last week to put some of the suggestions into
the form of Teaching Tips.

Brock Haussamen
ATEG President
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Gretchen Lee
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 12/9/00 10:07 PM
Subject: What do I do on Monday?

In a message dated 12/9/2000 3:49:17 PM Pacific Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< It would also be useful to include specific examples where there are
none
 -- in spare time, of course.:)

 judy

  [The ideal would be to build up enough concrete instances for teachers
to
 'get' the principle at work and so be able to design examples of their
 own...=-- an online grammar course? >>

Judy,

Several teachers who lurk on this list and I have been talking about
starting
a list specifically for sharing concrete teaching ideas about grammar
for
middle school and lower.  NCTE has agreed to host it, but maybe we don't
need
it.  I can throw together a web page to store ideas if people want to
contribute through ATEG.  (Or maybe I'm asking the wrong question.  Is
there
an ATEG list for elementary and middle school teachers?)

For example, my focus this month in writing workshop has been commas.  I
keep
finding, however, that my sixth graders can't recognize some of the
structures that require commas in their own writing.  The difference
between
two independent clauses (however you define them!) joined by a
conjunction
and a sentence with a compound verb seems to be as big a mystery as it
was
before we started.  And before anyone asks, no - I didn't use worksheets
(well, okay.  I did make up an overhead with sentences from their
writing!).

We've "done" chunking, and sentence imitating, and sentence rearranging
(mostly with sentences from their novels - the current one is
_Beowulf_), and
I'm about to go to sentence combining to see if that helps.  But they
don't
SEE the different sentence structures.

Should I be "doing" sentence patterns?  How does one do that within the
context of their writing?

Any concrete tips for me?

Gretchen in San Jose
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