What Ph says is fairly inspiring: >I began teaching 24 sentence patterns > to them - one per week. I also have numerous strategies that we used to > reinforce the patterns throughout the week. We worked with clauses, > participles, gerunds, infinitives. The kids really liked the program and > their writing improved drastically. I am not a researcher so I kept no > data. I only know that prior to the program 0% of my students exceeded on > the state writing test and only 34% passed. By the end of the second > year, 89% of the students were exceeding and 11% meeting. I continued the > program and am now sharing it with other teachers who are reporting the > same successes. This sounds like something that BOTH the elementary and the senior levels of grammar teaching can take an interest in. I hope that the elementary teachers do not start a separate listserve. If the listserve as is hasn't been hospitable enough to elementary interests then we should start. I would ask the elementary set to give us another chance: post in with some practical questions and give us another chance to propose a practical answer! ----------------------------------------------------- Sincerely, Robert Einarsson please visit me at www.artsci.gmcc.ab.ca/people/einarssonb 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/