More about Grammar and Punctuation!

Who would have thought punctuation and grammar could be so interesting?

I finally found a link to the wonderful Grammar Book I've been using. As always, take the ideas and twist them for your own purpose and your own classroom - but the ideas here are wonderful. The book is called Awesome Hands-on Activities for Teaching Grammar by Susan Van Zile.

With Kung Fu Punctuation (or Punctuation Kung Fu), I was unfortunately unable to find any video of it being taught on the BBC program The Unteachables. I was able to find this article - Punching Home the Art of Punctuation - written by the teacher in question Phil Beadle, in which he describes Kung Fu Punctuation, as well as other grammar activities. In our case, the students and I listed the punctuation marks first, and then decided what actions we'd give them. In this way, we had our own ownership of the activity.

Things I'm doing well: Grammar and Punctuation

At the moment, I'm taking a bit of time to reflect on where I want to improve and what I'm doing well. You can find the master list of reflections here.


Grammar and Punctuation

It's been a bit of a break with running around at school and trying to rug up against the cold. But I'm back again, this time with a look at grammar and punctuation.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that I am teaching this well. I was a student who was never taught more than a noun, verb and adjective (Stephen King taught me about adverbs) and basic punctuation. Yet, as I hold more onto the idea that we must write for our readers, I have realised how important that knowledge of grammar and punctuation is. So I've taught myself.

(Hear that Qld government. Teachers can find their own weak points and correct them. We don't need the professional development which you think we need to be shoved down our throats . . .)

The best tool we've found for punctuation is a kinesthetic tool - Kung Fu Grammar. Basically the student and I listed all the punctuation we could think of. Then as we used them, we made 'kung fu' actions which matched (favourites include the full stop - a flat palm pushed forward - and the quotation mark - stand on one leg and wiggle your fingers above your head). We use these when we look at sentences and how they should be puctuated. Somehow the physical movement means that students remember the rules of puctuation. Furthermore, we're using the punctuation vocabulary. And it's fun.

When it came to grammar, I used this fabulous book, which of course is at school - but I'll put a link in later. It has all these fun, active, engaging ways of looking at and describing the mechanics of grammar and then how they're used. It often involves creating displays for visual learners (a simile tree is a big favourite). The students often don't believe me when I tell them they've just done a grammar lesson.

One of my favourites was looking at the different types of sentences. Students matched sentences that were similar and then had to explain why they were similar - they knew the characteristics of the sentence types before they even knew the names of the sentence types. Later we turned the sentence types into cartoon characters with Sergant Imperative being a popular choice. All the students can now name and identify the four type of sentences .

What has this experience taught me this year? Well grammar and punctuation can be fun. Students can learn it and not need to be constantly retaught it. And understanding the aspects of grammar and punctuation is essential when explaining how writing works or doesn't work.

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NAPLAN Day 1: Language Conventions and Writing

Yesterday was the first day of NAPLAN, Australia's national testing. It's only the second year this test has been in practice and we're still trying to get our heads around some of it. There are many, many issues with the testing regime (like the fact it's based on an unwritten national curriculum) but alas, our Yr 3, 5 and 7s had to be tested anyway.

I supervised my 10 Grade 5s as well as my next door neighbour's Grade 7s (16 kids in all). There were two tests yesterday, one today and one tomorrow (the 7s have an extra test tomorrow) With a quick look, I think my kids did all right.

Language Conventions
This test is basically spelling, grammar and punctuation. The spelling seems to be designed to utterly freeze the children. They are given misspelt words in sentetences/diagrams and asked to find them (sometimes they are circled) and fix the spelling. For a poor speller, this is terrifying and it's the first thing you see in the test. For a good speller it's confusing - once you see the misspelt word you start to second guess your own knowledge. I had one student who I told to skip this section and come back to it, but she still burst into tears when there was only 5 minutes left and she had 3 words to go. (Nothing worse than a 10 year old in tears over a national test)

The Grammar and Punctuation for the Year 5s was good, although there was one format they didn't have last year and didn't warn us about. In places it was a little simple for my students, and I think they've done well, though I want to continue to work on different tenses. The Year 7 was was a definate kick up from the Year 5s, so I'm going to have to keep working hard on the Year 6s for next years test.

Writing

The writing test requires students to write a narrative based on a stimulus. Last year the stimulus was 'Found' with a number of story ideas and good pictures. This year it was one picture and barely any ideas and the stimulus was 'The Box' - rather abstract. All my students wrote in paragraphs and had almost interesting beginnings (a few began with dialogue which was great). Not as sure how they'll do, as I didn't have time to read them all.


Bribes

Our school had a low completion rate last year, so this year we're bribing them with jelly beans - 1 for every completed test (and a page of writing in the writing test.) One of the year 7s wrote his page yesterday, put his hand up and asked "do I have to write more?"

"Yes!" I told him. "Finish your story"

So he wrote another paragraph or two and collected his jelly bean . . .

Preparing for NAPLAN: The NAPLAN Game Show

NAPLAN (Australia's national testing for Year 3,5,7 and 9) begins on Tuesday, so I took advantage of a clear day yesterday to set up a game show in preparation. The class was broken into 2 teams, with equal numbers of 5s and 6s since the 6s had sport later in the afternoon. All activities corresponded with a section of the NAPLAN test.

Round One: Writing Ideas in 5 minutes. Each group was given the same writing stimulus and had to come up with as many story ideas as possible in 5 minutes. Points given for most ideas and most original ideas.

Round Two: Three parts to one story. There were 12 students in each team, so four of them wrote story beginnings, four wrote story middles and four wrote story endings. Then they had to put them together to make four different stories. They were only allowed 5 minutes to talk to each other before they started. Points for best story and funniest story.

Round Three: Spelling Relay. The NAPLAN spelling test requires students to find the mispelt word in a sentence and fix it. The relay had the students lining up in their teams running forward to one of the two easles and fixing the mispelt word, and running back to the next student. Points for fastest and for each correct word.

Round Four: Kung Fu Puncuation Kung-Fu Off: Students correct a poorly punctuated grammatically incorrect sentence by 'acting out' the sentence using Kung Fu Punctuation (must explain that some time). Points for correct corrections and for style.

Round Five: Team Maths Competition: Students work in a team to complete an old practice test. Points for fastest and for each correct problem.

Round Six: Comprehension Quiz Show: Students read a comprehension text and participate in a quiz show style event.


It was a fabulous day which really relaxed some of the students about taking this test next week and was just, down right fun.