Teaching Grammar in Middle School
New Lesson in our Teacher Pay Teacher Store
There are so many debates nowadays when it comes to grammar instruction. To explicitly teach grammar concepts or not to explicitly teach grammar concepts? To teach grammar in context or not to teach grammar in context? Some grammar experts even argue that we should just get rid of all the grammatical terminology that we grew up learning, like phrase and clause, and instead just teach sentence structure. This can be found in the post by Edutopia and in the new book, Between the Commas by Martin Brandt. One thing is for sure…we are noticing that each year our students are coming to our classrooms with more and more gaps in their grammar knowledge. This is not the fault of the teachers prior, but the result of such grammar debates and changes in curriculum instruction. We really have no dog in this fight. Our one goal is to make sure that our students leave our classrooms with an understanding of sentence structure and how to organize their paragraphs within an essay.
We definitely have our go-to grammar curriculum books and favorite authors such as Grammar Keepers, by Gretchen Bernabei, Everyday Editing and Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson, and Paragraphs for Middle School and Nonfiction for Middle School by Jenny and Donald Killgallon. Aside from reading and basing our curriculum instruction on the ideas of the authors listed above, we also use websites like No Red Ink and quill.org to supplement our instruction.
Over the past 14 years of planning, writing, and teaching together in our middle school classrooms, we have come up with a list of the top grammar mistakes that we have noticed our students make year after year. So, we created a presentation that covers some of the most common grammar errors we see in student writing, along with quick lessons on how to fix them. We use these amazing lessons throughout the year to reinforce grammar rules and provide our students with more practice on fixing those pesky grammar errors.
While we truly believe that grammar is best learned through authentic writing practice, some grammar rules must be taught explicitly. These lessons work best when they are taught explicitly to the class and practiced as a class before having the students try these rules out in their own writing. The great thing about teaching grammar is that you can teach it as stand alone lessons or as editing and revision techniques when students are working on rough drafts.
The grammar fix-up strategies we feel most of our students need more help and support with are word choice, spell check errors, comma use, use of pronouns and pronoun-antecedent agreement, quotation punctuation and integrating quotes into text, capitalization, sentence structure - including compound, complex, and how to fix common sentence errors, verb tense, using appositives, and using hyphens in a sentence correctly.
If you find that your students are struggling with the same grammar errors, we have created an awesome resource that can be found over at our Teacher Pay Teacher store. We feel that they really help our students.
What do you find works best for you and your students when it comes to grammar instruction? Do you have any go-to favorite lessons or instructional practices that work for you and your students? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line on our Insta or Twitter.
Until next time teacher friends,
Bottoms up!