Gretchen,

         Congratulations on having one of those days that is the best
reward a teacher can have!

                 Mary Mocsary
                 Southeastern Louisiana University

At 02:23 AM 9/17/04, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I just spent a wild week trying to get some basic grammar across to sixth
>graders.  It was frustrating, exhilarating, and weird.
>
>If you can bear with me, I'd like to share it with you and get some feedback.
>
>Our English department decided after much discussion to teach a more
>formal course of grammar because the students didn't have the vocabulary
>to discuss their writing.  It's very hard to discuss punctuating
>introductory clauses if the students have no idea what a clause is.  Our
>anecdotal feeling was that our minilessons were not enough for the
>students to really gain an understanding of the interrelationship of the
>language, so we needed to do more work with grammar so as to be all on the
>same page for writing.  (Yes, I realize we are sitting squarely on the
>Continental Divide of linguists and comp teachers, but that's how it
>shaped up.)
>
>My first task was to familiarize my students with parts of speech and
>sentence parts (I am tired of telling students to use vivid verbs to
>describe actions, not weak verbs with adverbs, and having them look at me
>blankly).  I decided to write out some sentences on large pieces of paper,
>one word to a page, and give a page to each student.  They got their words
>and did a "mingle" during which they shook hands and exchanged pages to
>music. When the music stopped, they kept the word in their hands, and
>silently had to form groups of similar parts of speech.
>
>Each word was color coded, so after we dealt with parts of speech, the
>students got to group according to sentence, and then figure out the
>sentence.  It was fascinating to listen to them discuss word order and
>modification; by talking and reasoning, they learned more than I could
>have ever gotten across in a lecture!
>
>Once they had a workable sentence, I asked them to "hook up" to each
>other. The prepositions grabbed their objects, the adjectives linked to
>their nouns, the adverbs stuck to their verbs, etc.  They had a lot of fun
>trying to represent their relationships.
>
>Then I called out directions to the sentence parts - simple predicates
>twirl, complete subjects do the wave, prepositional phrases jump up and
>down, etc.  They really were excited about it, and there was lots of
>discussion about who should move and why.
>
>Then today, I passed out the same sentences typed onto a transparency
>which I cut up, word by word.  I asked each group to look at the words and
>come up with a system to represent the relationships between the words
>that would be effective on the overhead.  They worked absolutely quietly
>for twenty minutes (and that's unusual for sixth graders!).  I was
>fascinated by their work; most of them separated the simple subjects and
>simple predicates and globbed the prep phrases together off to one
>side.  They pretty much ignored adjectives and adverbs; they were stuck
>off to one side in as close to word order as they could get. They were all
>frustrated by their inability to really represent the sentences.
>
>So . . . tomorrow I introduce diagramming.
>
>I guess the bottom line is that they were having such fun with it that
>they were asking for "that word game" all during homeroom, and when I said
>we were going to play it again, they literally cheered.  I have no idea if
>it will stick better so that my writing curriculum is more effective, but
>they no longer groan at the word grammar.  (As an intro to the first
>grammar lesson, I had them brainstorm words that described their feelings
>towards grammar and got everything from boring, yucky, useless, to scary
>and terrifying - even if I do nothing else, I think I've erased that attitude!)
>
>I'm sure that lots of other teachers do this better than I, but I was
>energized by the excitement of the students as they tried to figure out
>who to link to and when to move. They work cooperatively as a group to
>help each other, and those with weak grammar skills still enjoyed the
>exercise without shutting down.
>
>I would love to hear from other middle school teachers who have figured
>out nontraditional ways to get these concepts across.  Any constructive
>feedback would be welcome.  What can I do to improve what I'm doing?
>
>Thanks for staying with me this long,
>Gretchen
>
>
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>
>Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

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