'Grammar: the difference between knowing your crap, and knowing you're crap." Ok, it doesn't have *quite* the same ring to it as when it used a cuss word instead of crap, but the thought is still the same, and it's still funny.
As I said earlier, 10th grade English 1st semester is HARD. By now, 3 weeks in, my kids have had their first grammar test. All of the sweet, loving, appreciative thoughts they had about me when we were reading
The Scarlet Letter last year have disappeared. Now, they know the truth. I'm out to make their lives miserable. I can't tell you how many times I have heard "Why do you hate us, Miss Chappell?" in the past week. I just laugh.
Because I know the truth.
I love these kids. I really do. I can see the potential and the ability in their cute little faces, and I want the best for them. Are every one of them going to have to identify the difference between an action and a linking verb in his or her future careers? No. More than likely, very few of them will have to do so. Am I still going to drive the facts into their brains for the next 15 weeks? You bet.
And here's why: no matter what career they choose, all are going to have to communicate in some capacity. If they go to college, those papers and speeches and presentations will add up faster than the empty Easy Mac containers in their dorms. The more they know of the grammar I'm teaching them, the more likely As will be piling up instead of Fs. If they choose to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, landscapers, etc.- all of them will communicate and write in some way. They'll be judged on their abilities to communicate (or lack of ability). If they don't choose to go to college; if they decide to pursue a career right out of high school or enter the military, they will STILL have to communicate. Even if they never write another word, they'll certainly be speaking to authority figures, and the better they can communicate, the further they'll get in life. Sometimes, their ability to communicate well will directly correlate with the money they bring home; for instance, asking for a raise in a written document. AND (and here's the classic teacher line), even if they don't use these grammar skills in any other capacity, at some point in life they will be asked to do something difficult. Whether that will be in a career, a relationship, or a decision, etc., they'll be asked, and they will have to answer. So yes, this semester will be hard. It will be overwhelming. It will be challenging and painful at times. So will life. Better they encounter life's difficulty and challenge in the comfort of my cute classroom, than in their first job or with a child on the way. A favorite teaching quote of mine is "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy."
All that being said, I do try my best to challenge and entertain (like the best literature). The past two weeks we've focused on the eight parts of speech; the building blocks of all language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. Remember those?
In addition to worksheets and notes and lecture and homework assignments and quizzes (all the "not-fun" stuff), we've done a few things this week that I think are about as fun as it gets in the grammar world.
For the first two days, we studied Nouns and Pronouns. Now, nouns have subcategories like abstract and concrete, common and proper, collective and compound. Pronouns also have categories like personal, possessive, reciprocal, reflexive, interrogative, demonstrative, etc. I try to teach these in multiple learning styles so that my students have the best possible change of retaining the knowledge. We read about them, we take notes, I give charts to fill out and memorize, we use acronyms... and we play games. For the noun game, we split into multiple teams. Each team has a different colored marker. I give each team a paper labeled with one type (Personal Pronouns, Concrete Nouns, etc.) The team has 1 minute to write down as many of the type as they can think of. Then, we pass the papers. We can play this game for about 15-20 minutes, and students have to think of as many words as possible, no repeats. Winning team gets candy... whenever I can remember to pick some up at the store. Ha.
Next two days: Verbs and Adverbs. We go over the descriptions, the lists, memorize, take quizzes, etc. And then we play. We play charades. I have two bags of words. One bag is of adverbs, and one is of verbs. When it's your turn, you must take both an adverb and a verb. You must act both out. Watching kids act out how to "elegantly dig" (actually, this one was an evaluation day once, and my principal was playing the game, and he drew these two. That is a moment I'll never forget), or to sleep noisily is a fun day for me. It helps in teaching the difference between action and linking verbs, because how in the world do you "act" out the verb
am? It also helps them remember that not all adverbs end in -ly. Because when you have to "dance soon", there is no -ly.
Adjectives and Prepositions: For adjectives (describe nouns), I put something in a bag, and one person gets to describe it to the class using one-word adjectives until the class guess the item. I usually just find things in my desk the day of- a highlighter, clothespin, quarter, tape dispenser, etc. And we play some Apples to Apples. I was told this week, "You just ruined my life by telling me that every time I play Apples to Apples I'm doing grammar."
For prepositions, we do some artwork. Step one. Draw a house. Step two. Draw something on the house. Draw something next to the house. Draw something above the house. Draw something beneath the house. Get the picture? Prepositions show relationship of words and objects. Then we do some more visual learning: anything an ant can do to a hill=preposition. It can go up the hill, down the hill, around the hill, through the hill, under the hill, etc. I also have a handout that shows this with a picture of mice and cheese.
Conjunctions and Interjections are our last day. Conjunctions connect. They have to do a lot of memorizing with acronyms for this. I have yet to think of a fun game. :/ Interjections most kids remember- anything that interrupts the sentence with emotion. Yikes! Yahoo! Oops! The kids enjoy thinking of examples, and they're fascinated to find that cuss words have a part of speech.
A couple days of review, lots of worksheets, some Kooshball review on the smartboard (throw a kooshball at the board, whatever it hits, that's the question that pops up to answer), etc. There you have it! Two weeks of Parts of Speech, and one VERY hard test. :)
These are some of my FAVORITE ideas I've found on Pinterest:
Grammar Flip Book
M&M Parts of Speech Game
