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 [log in to unmask] To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/