Gretchen,
Thanks for sharing your successful grammar lessons. This is very helpful to
me.
--
Christine Reintjes Martin
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----Original Message Follows----
From: Gretchen Lee <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Silly, rewarding grammar period
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 15:53:24 EDT
Hi,
I'm sure this is of no interest to the college folks, but I had to write.
I
am teaching a class for middle school grammar-phobes this trimester. We
are
having so much fun! We have been looking at nouns - these are kids who
could not pick out a noun reliably, and some are in eighth grade.
We played noun bingo today. I gave them a blank bingo card and they got to
fill in any nouns they wanted to use. Listening to the incredible analyses
that went on was so rewarding. They have finally figured out that one noun
can
be classified several different ways, and they spent ten minutes trying to
figure out the most "juicy" nouns - nouns that fit in the most
classifications.
Was "Metallica" anything other than a proper noun and a collective noun?
Could it be concrete because you could touch the band? Was it countable?
What
about "rage"? A child could have rages - did pluralizing it make it
concrete? Was that like tantrums? If you used "John's," did it count for
both proper
and possessive? And, "Hey, Mrs. Le, he used it for plural, even though it
had an apostrophe!!" The best part was when things were ambiguous, and
suddenly their cases for a given classification had just as much
justification as
mine ("Mrs. Le, is "sky" concrete? There's really no such thing, ya know.
We
just learned about the stratosphere last year, and there's really no such
thing as sky. I want to use it as abstract; it's really more of an idea!"
Etc.)
All this for four Teddy Grahams.
These kids are having so much fun, and suddenly they "get" it. My biggest
grammar-phobe from last year begged me to let the class look at pronouns
next,
because he remembered that there were lots of "classes" and he thinks he'll
get them now.
So much of this is mind set. Because it's an elective that they chose to
take, their attitudes are so different. We'll see if it holds up, but so
far
no sign of the frustration I saw last year.
On to Parts-of-Speech Go Fish! Does anyone have any possessive pronouns?
~Gretchen
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