Teaching verbs with older students? Verbs are powerful tools in student writing and in their literature! Verbs: the backbone of sentences, the fun part of sentences, the words connected to…
Browsing Categorygrammar
What kind of grammar lesson will you write?
What grammar lesson do you want your students to see? The approach we take with each grammar lesson will influence how our students interact with future discussions concerning language. (I…
Engaging Grammar Activities for Review
Engaging grammar activities for review. Reflecting on my teaching experiences, I review grammar with students to clarify rules for college entrance exams. We review grammar before final exams. We review…
Hands-On Grammar Lessons
Hands-on grammar lessons: students holding and engaging with their language? Yes, please. Students LOVE manipulating, playing, and holding their language with grammar manipulatives. When I talk about hands-on grammar lessons,…
Types of Sentences Worksheets and More
Types of sentences worksheets, activities, lessons, tricks, and more! Simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences: these sentences are tough to recognize. You might be intimidated to teach them. This post…
Grammar Must Be Taught, Differently
Grammar must be taught. How we teachers cover grammar, that is the difference. If you are an ELA teacher on social media, you’ve likely seen the meme that quotes this…
How to Build a Grammar Lesson: An Author Shares Her Secrets
How to Build a Grammar Lesson: This post aims to help you from start to finish. My first book, The English Grammar Workbook, was published in 2018. While writing it, I figured…
Grammar Is More Than Writing
“Grammar” is more than a key to better writing. So often, teachers will tell me that grammar does not help student writing. I think in a certain way, that yes,…
Middle School Grammar
I’ve taught middle school grammar before. Here are a few tricks I developed to make lessons meaningful. I taught middle school… six years ago? My administration provided a straightforward directive:…
I’m Not Silently Judging Your Grammar
I am simply not judging your grammar. Recently, I’ve seen a weird and unfortunate joke popping up online. There are posters, mugs, t-shirts and memes: I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar.…