Grammar, editing and proof-reading. One area of English
teaching that I have always struggled to make engaging, fun, exciting and if I am
being honest, truly useful. That’s not to say the skill isn’t. It certainly is,
I just worry that my teaching of it isn’t as effective as my teaching of
creative writing for example. Whilst scrolling TwitterEd the other evening I stumbled
upon a Secondary English teacher who was using dictation from classic authors
to give his children a bank of writing styles and a wealth of good sentence
structure etc. And I had a light bulb moment so to speak. Couldn’t I do a
similar thing to improve my classes editing and proof reading skills. So I had
a go.
Now I will be honest I am lucky that I work in a school that
I am trusted to roll the dice on a new idea and see what happens and this could’ve
flopped. In fact it did. A couple of times. This in itself was brilliant. My
class and I sat down and discussed together how we could make this better and
this is what happened.
Idea 1: I read out a piece of text and insisted the children
used no grammar at all, no full stops or capital letters. Nothing. They were
then given ten lives (another idea pinched from the unknown twitter guru). With
ten minutes to use they had to go through and using purple pens add in where
they felt punctuation was needed. Upon completion of this, I read through the
text telling them where the grammar should be. For every incorrect or missed
piece they lost a life. This worked, to a degree. It was too abstract, my
slower writers struggled to keep up and it was too difficult to see what were
intended corrections and where children had written in ones they had got wrong.
Idea 2: Same thing however now children were to write on
every other line. This left a space for them to then write their own corrected
version above. This made it clearer to follow and easier for them to check
their own work. I also typed up the text onto the IWB and revealed it line by
line so they only had one line to consider at a time. Furthermore, I highlighted
exactly where the punctuation should’ve been used. Better but we still needed
to make subsequent corrections clearer.
Idea 3: Same as above however now when we went through the
answers the children added in anything they missed using coloured pencil. This
was I can see how much of the editing they have got right and what particular punctuation
features they missed.
And without being arrogant, it was great. Genuinely one of
the best grammar lessons I have ever taught for the following reasons;
1. I was able to introduce my whole class to extracts
of Sky Chasers by Emma Carroll, Brightstorm by Vashti Hardy and The Hobbit by
J.R.R.Tolkien in an hour lesson
.
2. We were able to analyse for every single piece
of grammar why it was there, why it was needed and what its job was. In one
instance a child said ‘it needs a comma because it is two adjectives next to each
other’. However in this example the second adjective was in fact acting as a
noun. A brilliant teaching point it would’ve taken me much longer to have
picked up in other ways.
3. The element of competitiveness (the lives) makes
them close read the entire passage. On occasion I threw in a curve ball by
telling them how many corrections they should be making and they reacted with fervor.
4. I have a list of specific grammar points that
when children are proof reading their own work I can point to and say, you
struggled with these issues last time so take a closer look.
5. It was a real wake up call to some of my
children who view themselves as the ‘better’ writers. Many struggled and I genuinely
think that they will take the editing and proof reading process more seriously
in future.
All of this was done in an hour but it only took that long because
we were discussing how to improve the process. It could easily be done in 20
minute sessions. I genuinely feel it will improve my class’ ability to proof
read their extended writing no end.
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