Teaching Grammar: Common Core Style

During class today, I tweeted this picture of my students doing a grammar lesson I stole from Jon Corippo.

@guster4lovers @jcorippo @ikeraya tell me more later! How the kids liked it etc

— Danesa Menge (@Jepson) March 26, 2015

@guster4lovers @Jepson @ikeraya share stories!!!

So I guess I need to share.

I started the lesson with a Google Drawing and these instructions (the picture is clickable and will take you to the graphic organiser):

In terms of workflow, here's what I do.  When students share documents back with me, I make a new folder in gmail with the assignment title, and I nest it under the period (1st/2nd for this class).  Then I read the names of people who have shared so that everyone gets their document turned in before we even start.

For grading, it makes it really easy - just scan through the folder and open the documents.

Anyway, back to the lesson.

Then I showed them this image:

And that's where the fun began.

I had them write a three word Tarzan sentence that included a subject.  We shared.

Then we worked through the parts of speech they saw in the picture, starting with verbs, moving to adverbs, nouns, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions (FANBOYS, one of the only things I remember from middle school), pronouns, and finally, interjections.

Interjections are fun for this picture.

I had to do a lot of modeling, of checking examples, of making sure they chose words that were actually adverbs, etc.  But for the most part, we moved through that first part quickly, and the energy and noise level were really high. 

They were excited about grammar.  And they wrote fantastic similes.

Then we started the paragraph.

There was total silence.  

Actually, let me show you.

They finished with about 8 minutes left in class, which means it only took about 30 minutes for the whole lesson.  That's a lot less time than I had planned.  

Then something really cool happened.

Without any prompting, they started trading computers and reading each others' paragraphs.  They were so excited about their grammar work that they shared them of their own volition.

That's a big improvement on the holt grammar sheets I used for years...worksheets that were themselves copied from Warriner's and given new clip art.

Here's a video of a few kids reading their paragraphs to the class.  I didn't plan to do that, but they really really wanted to share.

Here are the three volunteers' documents:

Lucas     Georgia      Claire

Now, I'm going through and offering feedback on them, which is easy given that they are Google Draw documents so I can use comments tied to any of the boxes.

Generally, a full class set (25) takes me about 30 minutes.  Plus, I already checked a lot of them during class to make sure they were keeping up, so I'm really only looking at the paragraphs.

**

As Morgan indicated, there will clearly be more of these.

Doing work that is both fun and that I know is effective in teaching them something important is exciting.  And not just to me.

Want more information about the 8 pARTS lesson?  Check out this site.  And thanks again to Jon Corippo for letting me steal years of his hard work!