MiddleWeb's
Reading/Writing Workshop Project
Ideas for Teaching
Grammar and Spelling
During a discussion of grammar and spelling, project members offered
these ideas.
Juli Kendall
Grammar -
1. Go through your district standards or grade level expectations for what
students should know about grammar.
2. Make a list or a curriculum map of all that they need to learn about
grammar for their grade level and plot out where and when you will teach
each piece during the year.
3. When you teach grammar, use a context (book, selection of text, piece
of
student writing) that addresses the concept or "thing" you are
teaching, say
prepositional phrases, etc.
4. Guiding Readers and Writers, a book by Fontas and Pinnell, has a whole
section on doing a Language Block as a part of reading and writing workshop.
It has lots of great ideas that work.
Spelling -
1. I always initally assess spelling using tests that I get from the book,
Words Their Way, by Bear, et. al. These tests have 20-25 words and allow
you to see where the kids are. They can be used for grouping in spelling
instruction or as a pre and post assessment to look at growth.
2. Kids should always be given an opportunity to learn their grade level
spelling words as well as words from their reading and writing. Once again,
Guiding Readers and Writers has a great section on how to do spelling using
a system with spelling partners.
A word about the importance of grammar -
I taught Spanish 1-2 to a group of "gifted" 8th grade students
several years
ago and I learned lots about what we aren't teaching our kids in English
grammar. Much of foreign language instruction is still based on learning
verb tense and parts of speech. These kids who had come through a good
program didn't have a clue about using what they knew about grammar and
syntax in English to help them understand how to learn Spanish. They had
nothing concrete to link to. They couldn't make connections. We spent
way
too much time learning names of things in English so we could understand
what nourns, etc. were in Spanish.
Syntax and knowing what "register" to use when they write and
speak in
school is critically important for kids.
Other suggestions
Use word cards, or those magnetic words. creat labels for parts of speech.
Have indivduals or groups use the parts of speech and words to create sentences
with punctuation etc.
David Taylor
---------------------------------
I teach all my grammar lessons through mini-lessons (group and individual),
doing class edits of students from past years, having the kids edit other
papers, d.o.l.'s, and games. I heard Nancie ATwell just came out with a
book
of mini-lessons. Anyone heard of it/read it?
In a workshop setting, you do minilessons on whole-class issues (as it
relates to writing) and individual instruction during writing
conferences. In these first few weeks of school, I have concentrated
most of my grammar/language efforts on sentence combining exercises.
The research shows that sentence combining practice positively effects
diverse sentence structures during writing when used and addressed
consistently.
As for parts of speech, of what value is that information? I have yet
to figure out why it's important to know these things, so I'm interested
in hearing the "why" for this concept.
Ellen Berg
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