How to Develop Kids’ Passion for…Grammar?

One of the most awkward parts of teaching for me is when I’m faced with the task of leading students through content in which I myself don't feel strongest.

I remember my principal asking me to move up to fourth grade - traditionally a big writing (and tested) year. I immediately started researching the 4th grade Standards, and I saw that I was going to have to teach compound and complex sentences. And I was SCARED. 

Students need to know their parts of speech, subjects, predicates, subject-verb agreement, comma usage, capitalization, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, independent and dependent clauses, and punctuation.

Yeah. I know. That’s a lot. They’re 9 and 10 years old.

But there was another -  maybe even more daunting  - reason.

There were many nights in my own fourth grade life where I dreaded the every week task of diagramming sentences. I could locate all the parts, but I had NO IDEA what they meant. Trees and trees of diagramming…and I couldn’t apply it to save my life in my writing.

As life had it, the perfect opportunity came the summer before I taught that next year.

I spent four weeks at UCLA becoming a National Writing Project Fellow. I thought, going in, it would be a “sit and listen” type deal. NOPE.  I had to write. I was sitting side by side with teachers who were writing screenplays and novels. 

Remember, I could write…but had no idea why or how it all worked. Day by day, with the patience and feedback from my writing group, I learned that writing instruction isn’t a list of skills. It’s communicating, revising, editing, sharing, listening, and looking at models. 

By having to examine myself in the writing process, I began to understand that writing was crafting. Each piece of grammar and every single word directly affects what goes on in my reader’s head! 

And…here’s the biggest part…I get to make those choices. THAT'S POWER!

I realized then what I needed to teach. If I told kids how powerful they were when they used grammar, punctuation, capitalization, that would change how they thought about learning them.

There was a PURPOSE, and it wasn’t testing, or grades, or “because we have to learn it in 4th grade.” It was the audience and their intentions as authors -  authentic reasons that shifted all those skills from things to be memorized to TOOLS.

I began to look at the curriculum again with the question: How can I present this lesson to them as writers with powerful choices?

I began to toss the worksheets and look at real writing. Why did an author place a comma there? What did a conjunction do when you stuck it in there?

My lesson planning became choosing precise sentences that modeled the grammar I wanted kids to learn, lifted from books we were reading. For example, when we were studying capitalization of cities and states, I found sentences containing those.

And, instead of telling them straight out what the rule was and why, we’d take an inquiry approach with the following questions:

What do you notice? 

How are the sentences the same or different?

Why do you think the author did that?

What happens if that particular thing changes?

How have you seen that in other writing?

What are you doing in your writing with this?

Ok, I’ll admit. Every year, at the beginning of the year, I promise them that they will be speaking the language of grammar by the end of the year. They look at me like I am crazy.

And the first few months are tricky. Hands are few and coaching is high. We find that they’ve HEARD of these things before, but, like me, don’t really know how to use them.

Slowly, we begin to re-learn everything as a writer with POWER.

They become detectives, driven to create, play, and master with accuracy. They try things out in different ways and read them to each other to see how an audience reacts.

As they begin to show in their writing they’ve got it, we add more tools to our toolbox.

Once we’ve got simple sentences down, for example, I’ll offer, “Hey, you guys, I’m seeing accuracy with this. I see you’re ready to build a variety of sentences to make your writing more interesting. Let’s look at compound sentences today!” 

They’re not scared. They’re EXCITED. Grammar is an opportunity to make their writing BETTER!

It’s January, and last week we started back with our grammar talk. I put up the first sentence and the room exploded:

• “I see the author used a coordinating conjunction to join the two independent clauses.”

• “Oh, and they had to use a comma to show that those two clauses are separate, but the conjunction shows the relationship between the two.”

• “That possessive pronoun tells us that the author is part of the classroom that’s the subject of the independent clause.”

I’M NOT KIDDING. We have a blast with grammar.

And here’s the bonus payoff: they’re going to score high on their state test. I know it.

 They’re writers who know what they’re doing - but that was the focus all along.