Throughout this week’s classes, I learned a lot about sentence structure. BEACUASE I have no prior knowledge of proper grammar, it was a little difficult for me to pick apart sentences and show what each word meant. There was the subject and verb, pretty easy at first. BUT once adverbs and adjectives, along with prepositional phrases were thrown into the mix, I was seemingly caught off guard.
After going through different newspapers and taking apart the headlines throughout the pages, it started making more sense to me. I was seeing what parts of speech were placed and why they were placed in their specific locations. I feel that I have more of a grasp on the concepts after going through them again. Being an English major, I feel like I should know all of this like the back of my hand, but in actuality, I do not. I hope that through this class, I can make more sense of these concepts and utilize them throughout my life, as well as, my classroom.
In order to be able to teach this, I am going to need to know way more. I learned this week that I have a long way to go in terms of grammar in order to be confident in what I am teaching. Confidence is really important in the classroom and grammar is probably the place in which I am the least confident. I learned this week that it will take lots of practice for me to get to where I need to be in terms of grammar.
My question this week is: How would I go about teaching grammar in a way that is easy for students to learn and also fun for them to learn? I have problems learning when concepts aren’t presented in an interesting way. How do I translate this to grammar and make fun, interesting lessons that help students actually learn the material?
Unfortunately, it seems that grammar is mostly just about drilling until it's more or less ingrained in your skull. One of my old English teachers had a way of at least making the drilling itself fun: the class would split into groups of three or four and each group would have the same paper with various practice sentences on it. Whichever group finished first, second, third (and did so correctly) would get a few points of extra credit. I can safely say that by the end of the year, the entire class knew at least basic grammar inside and out.
ReplyDeleteyes, "grammar" can be taught by drilling, but that's all students will know. They won't know why this makes any difference at all in their writing.
ReplyDeleteStay tuned. The course will address this question head-on a bit later.
oh Rachel--I forgot to say that BECAUSE doesn't follow our pattern of the week: using AND, BUT, or OR to start a sentence.
ReplyDeletefyi.