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Priceless Literacy
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Professional
Development Team

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Grammar Girl –
Mignon Fogarty
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Grammar is
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“a set of rules for putting together a sentence.”
 the rules to the game of writing.
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Teaching Grammar in
Context – Constance
Weaver
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Grammar is:
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Description of syntactic structure
Prescriptions for how to use structures and words
Rhetorically effective use of syntactic structures
Functional command of sentence structure that enables us to comprehend and produce language.

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Create opportunities
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Anchor (Mentor) texts
Workshop
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Mini-lessons (see The Write Source for excellent material re: grammar instruction)
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Writing (Process)
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Conference (questions)
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Revision (various processes)
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Re-writing (multi-drafts)

Joyce Armstrong
Carroll’s concrete approach to teaching grammar: a color-coding technique that focuses students on problematic areas in their writing.
Code Clue Decode
Verb
Active
Passive
Tenses
Subject/verb agreement
Participles
Direct/indirect objects
Fragments
Etc.

Katie was just a girl who wanted to fit in with everyone else. She wanted to be athletic, funny, pretty and popular with lots of friends. But she knew she could never become that type of girl.
She was the type of girl who had the ratty red hair with freckles everywhere and glasses that hid her beautiful baby blue eyes. But on the inside was a pure and loving soul, but nobody knew that Katie. All they saw was Katie, the girl who everyone loved picking on just to make her feel worse about herself. Until one day, Katie finally had enough.

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Approaches for Using Mentor Texts
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Read once for pleasure
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Reread at least once for author’s craft (STAAR R&E)
Reread with pencil or highlighter to mark the text
Build confidence in your readers/writers
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Imitation promotes practice and skill
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Achieve success at a higher level
Comfortably move from mentor text structure to a more sophisticated structure of their own
Increase variety on student work
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Begin with poetry and move to other text structures
Choose structures for content area success

Ralph Fletcher suggests a triangular schema to allow students to connect with the text or notice aspects of the texts in a democratic approach…
Word or Phrase
Tone or
Languag e
Craft Element
Structure
Subject or Theme
People usually focus on what they are ready to see.
Use that as a building block of your teaching.

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The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
…
--Naomi Shihab Nye. WORDS UNDER THE WORDS. 1995. (p. 80).

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Peer Models
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Analyze writing from peers
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Easier to be objective
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Making suggestions for others prepares the students for that same kind of analysis for their own writing
Personal Writing
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Spot various grammatical structures
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If they can find it, they are half-way there!
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If they are using various structures in their writing, affirm them and name the process.
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Identify usage (correct or not)

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If “wordiness" affects your writing quality…
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Sentence-combine to tighten your writing
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Avoid repetition—unless it serves a purpose
The new STAAR composition is only 26 lines long. Give students the opportunity to write on a topic, count lines and tighten their writing to 26 or fewer lines.

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Image Grammar (Harry Noden)
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Focusing on grammar’s power to make movies in our readers’ minds
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Grammar: “a power derived from images”
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Ideas

= Artistic Sentences
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Participles
Absolutes
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Appositives
Adjectives Shifted Out of Order
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Action Verbs
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Explore Images from Films of Bestselling Novels:
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Show a 2 to 3 minute soundless movie clip
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Ask students to write brushstroke phrases that describe the character’s actions or attitude during the second viewing and use those phrases to write a paragraph.
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Ask the students to read the novel version of the same scene they witnessed in the movie and read their own descriptions to look for similarities.

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Tour a Writer’s Gallery (samples)
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Enlarge and post writing samples (professional pieces—novels, newspapers, etc.) around the classroom.
Have groups visit the pieces and discuss the techniques they observed the authors using.
Ask them to list several of the phrases and words they noticed.
Have them write a descriptive paragraph to accompany a picture (magazine ads or others), including the brushstrokes they have learned.

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Copyedit a Boring, Vanilla Paragraph
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Revise a straightforward, plainly written piece of text, cutting unnecessary text and adding the images by using brushstrokes.
This moves the students from the recognition stage to the creative stage.
Have students take a beautifully written piece and devolve it into a boring vanilla paragraph. Then talk about what they cut or reworded and why.

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Improve your Image
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Ask students to enter their own writing and look for the same strategies/brushstrokes that they have practiced. If they don’t see any, they need to add some.
Ask volunteers to share with the class their
“before” and “after” make-overs—Discuss: action or cosmetic?

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Mechanically Inclined
(Jeff Anderson)
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Grammar is a tool to help the reader and writer “see.”
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Ask your students:
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“What do you notice?”
“What do you like about the sentence?”
“What happens if we change…”

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Articles
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“The Day the Earth Moved”
March 28, 2011 TIME
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Stories
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Nasreen’s Secret School
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 by Jeanette Winter
Novels
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Holes (excerpt) by Louis Sachar
Multi-genre

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Anderson, Jeff. 2007. Everyday Editing. Stenhouse.
---, 2005. Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's Workshop. Stenhouse.
Burke, Jim. 2008. The English Teacher’s Companion. Heinemann.
Campbell, Cathy. 2008. The Giggly Guide to Grammar. Discover Writing Press.
Carroll, Joyce Armstrong and Edward Wilson. 2010. Brushing Up on Grammar. Libraries Unlimited.
Carroll, Joyce Armstrong. 2011. Ratiocination. Absey & Co.
Fogarty, Mignon. 2008. Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Holt Paperbacks.
---, 2011. Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again. St. Martin’s.
Gallagher, Kelly. 2011. Write Like This. Stenhouse.
Knapp, Peter and Megan Watkins. 2005. Genre, Text, Grammar. University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
Noden, Harry. 2011. Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach, 2 nd Ed.. Boynton/Cook, Pub.
---. 2011. Image Grammar: Second Edition: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process. Heinemann.
Petersen, David. 2007. Reading English News on the Internet. Lulu.Com. (new edition: 2011).
Sebranek, Patrick, Dave Kemper, Verne Meyer and Gretchen Bernabei. 2012. Texas Write Source.
Grades 2-12. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Tchudi, Susan and Stephen Tchudi. 1999. The English Language Arts Handbook. Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Terban, Marvin. 1993. Checking Your Grammar. Scholastic Inc.
Thurman, Susan. 2003. The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need. Avon. MA: Adams Media.
Weaver, Constance. 1996. Teaching Grammar in Context. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.
Windsor, Lucinda. 2000. Grammar in Story. (2 books). Absey & Co.
Woods, Geraldine. 2010. English Grammar for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc.