Don’t Let Grammar Be the Star of Your Writing Block! Do This Instead

So a few weeks ago, we offered a free workshop called Three Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing Instruction. Maybe you were there, if so I’m so glad that you got to spend the session with us learning how to become a better writing teacher.

We got lots of good feedback on that workshop. And while we won’t be offering that specific workshop, again, this school year, there was a part of that session that really resonated with the audience that I did want to share with you. And if you came to the workshop, this is just gonna be a good refresher and a reminder to put these things in place in your classroom.

And that was the part of the workshop where we talked all about grammar instruction. And I know grammar is one of those things that anytime I talk about it, it seems to really help teachers. So hopefully this episode is going to just encourage you.

But during my workshop, my encouragement to teachers was Don’t let grammar be the star of your writing block. And I know that it can be tempting to use the bulk of your writing time to focus on grammar, it was tempting for me to do that I had like a 40 minute writing block. And I probably used 20 to 25 minutes every day to teach a grammar skill. And you know, I did that because there’s a lot of grammar standards that we have to teach.

And so I think we feel this pressure, that we have to teach each one in isolation and have a very focused intense lesson on all of these grammar skills. But I think in addition to that, grammar can sometimes feel easier to teach than writing, it’s both easier and harder to teach. You know, I think, especially if you rely heavily on grammar worksheets, it’s not a lot of prep. I know a lot of teachers don’t feel confident in their ability to teach writing, I definitely was in that category for a long time.

So teaching grammar can feel safer, it can feel easier, it can feel like we are making progress in our writing instruction. But I think the main reason why we spend so much time focusing on grammar is that we have this belief that if our students understand and know all of the grammar rules, then they’re going to become a strong writer. So then we can kind of bypass our writing instruction. And by teaching grammar, they will become strong writers because they’ll know all of the rules.

But you know, research really does suggest that teaching grammar in isolation does not show a significant improvement in student’s actual writing abilities. And I’m pretty confident that you’ve probably witnessed this firsthand in your classroom. Because I know this was very much true for me. I can probably guess with a lot of confidence that you have taught a grammar lesson, you had your students do some sort of grammar activity, they completed a worksheet and they probably aced a grammar quiz.

But yet, whatever the skill is that you taught them and that they practice, it doesn’t actually make its way to their individual writing. So our grammar instruction isn’t helping our students become stronger writers, there’s a disconnect there, there’s not a transfer between what we teach in isolated grammar lessons and what shows up in their writing.

And I think part of the problem is that we don’t give them enough context, or really examples of what grammar looks like in actual writing, because we’re using worksheets that have you know, isolated sentences that aren’t connected, or we teach it in isolation and don’t bring it into writing or reading conversations.

And so one of the things that we can do to really improve our grammar instruction is to make sure that we are really intentional about embedding grammar into not only our writing instruction, but also into our reading instruction as well. Because the truth is, is that having grammar knowledge and syntactical knowledge has just as big of an impact on students comprehension as it does their writing. And in fact, maybe you could argue that, you know, having knowledge of grammar is going to have a bigger impact on students reading comprehension than it does their writing.

So I think ultimately, we kind of need to have some mindset shifts around grammar instruction, and I’m going to share this with you and then I do have a very practical strategy that I’m going to share with you. But you know, first I think we really need to recognize that isolated grammar practice isn’t going to help our students become stronger writers. Yes, we have to teach grammar having that knowledge is important.

But ultimately, if we want our students to become stronger writers, they need to develop their sentence writing and paragraph writing skills. And the only way to do that is by sentence writing and paragraph writing. So grammar knowledge and grammar lessons that’s going to help your students develop that knowledge. But if we want our students to improve their writing, we have to teach them and give them time and opportunity to actually write sentences and paragraphs.

So the second thing we need to reconsider is that grammar knowledge will improve a student’s reading comprehension. So we don’t want to just limit our conversations around grammar to just our writing block and only talk about you know, capitalization and punctuation and subject verb agreement when our students are writing during writing time.

So instead, we want to be really intentional about, you know, talking about grammar, when our students are reading and like I said, I have a really good strategy that I’m going to share with you that’s going to help you do that.

But in addition, we also really need to make peace with the fact that grammar worksheets, while they are easy to plan and prep, they usually aren’t the most effective way to teach grammar skills to your students to the level of understanding that we really want them to have. So I’m not going to tell you to never use a grammar worksheet. I think that might be unrealistic, especially with how much teachers have to plan and prep.

But I do want you to be aware that grammar worksheets usually aren’t the most effective way to help our students develop and retain and really understand the grammar knowledge that we want them to have.

But I think the final and maybe the most important mindset shift we have to have is that you as the teacher don’t have to be a grammar expert, or you know, have all of the grammar knowledge in order to have these conversations and explore grammar rules with your students.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was teaching fourth grade, my grammar knowledge is not what it is now. I have had the you know, really the luxury to do a lot of research and grow my own content knowledge. But when I was in the classroom, I struggled to identify and understand what a complex sentence was, I really couldn’t explain to you the difference between a dependent or an independent clause. And I didn’t know the difference between a coordinating and subordinating conjunction.

Yet all of these things are concepts that I was supposed to teach my students. And I think, because I was not confident in my own knowledge, I spent more time teaching grammar concepts that I felt competent teaching things like parts of speech, capitalization, punctuation, because I knew that I could teach those things correctly, and give my students the feedback.

But ultimately, those skills were less important. And my students really did need to understand different types of clauses. And they really did need to be able to break down a complex sentence. And they needed to understand the different types of conjunctions and the roles that they play in a sentence. And, you know, I let my sort of lack of knowledge and fear of not being the expert prevent me from exploring those concepts with my students.

You know, and those concepts that I just listed, not only are they important to help students improve their writing, but they are really necessary when it comes to reading comprehension as well. And of course, we know that comprehension is a big deal in upper elementary.

So let me just encourage you, you know, if you don’t feel confident in grammar, and you are like, yeah, a lot of those things you just listed, I don’t know them, either. That is okay. Because you can learn right alongside your students. And I actually think that there’s a lot of power, when you’re having a conversation about, you know, some grammar thing, and you tell your students something like this is hard. It’s confusing.

You know, even for me as an adult, it’s hard, but I want to help you figure it out. So we’re going to learn this together, you know, and you can go on the grammar journey with your students. So you don’t have to have the knowledge yourself. You just need to know where to look to find that knowledge.

So a few sources that might be helpful for you. And we’ll link to all of these in the show notes. But the Writing Revolution book by Natalie Wexler, and Judith Hochman, I’ve recommended it before it is my go to writing PD book. And it has a lot of really great helpful information that breaks down and explains a lot of the very basic and essential writing concepts. So that’s a great resource.

Also, the Comprehension Blueprint by Nancy Hennessy has a really strong section on syntax. And again, it really explains a lot of the syntactical knowledge that our students need to have.

A really easy resource to access that is online, is the University of Purdue has what is called the Purdue OWL, the Online Writing Lab. And I actually use this when I was getting my masters because they have a just a ton of writing resources. They have a lot of things that are like dedicated to like APA and MLA citations, but they do have a general writing section.

And it covers a lot of grammar concepts like sentence fragments and capitalization rules and what an appositive or a gerund is. And so that could be even a really great source just for you to go and build your own knowledge. And most of the examples that they share are very basic and simple.

But in addition, if you want a very simple resource that will give you just access to some of the most general grammar information, I would encourage you to go grab our sentence writing reference sheets on TPT, we will link to them in the show notes. They give your students all of the foundational knowledge about words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and texts. And we really originally created these for students in mind to use as a reference sheet.

But we have heard from so many teachers that have used them, that that resource really helps them build their knowledge about phrases and clauses, and it helps them feel so much more competent teaching these concepts to their students. So like I said, go check those out. And of course, if you are a member of the Stellar Literacy Collective, you already have access those in your membership hub. So go download them if you’ve not been using them yet today.

Okay, so like I mentioned earlier, you guys know that grammar worksheets don’t always work the way that we hoped they would. Which means that we do need to have other strategies and tools available to us that will help our students understand important grammar concepts. And there are so many different ways that you can do that. But I’m going to share with you just one really easy strategy. And because I’m only sharing one really easy strategy with you, I want you to start using it today or sometime this week.

And this strategy is really going to give your students an understanding of how words work together in a text. And you know, you can use it to cover a variety of grammar concepts. And this strategy or routine is called the words working together routine. And it’s adapted from a strategy that Nancy Hennessy shares in her Reading Comprehension Blueprint.

The strategy is very quick, it requires very little planning and prep on your part, you don’t even have to make any copies. But it really does give you a great opportunity to have a strong discussion with your students about the parts of speech and how they work together in a sentence, but you can really extend it and expand it beyond the parts of speech. So you can use it to discuss really any aspect of grammar.

So the routine is just five steps. So first is to select a sentence from the texts that you are reading. Any text that you are reading, it can be a picture book, it can be a novel, it can be an article, it can be a paragraph from your textbook, just find a sentence. I would encourage you to find a sentence that is relatively essential to the meaning or plays a critical role in their understanding, because it’s going to help students really understand it.

Once you’ve identified your sentence, you are going to plan three to five targeted questions that are really going to focus on the grammar concepts in that sentence. And I’m going to give you some examples of what those questions could be. Once you have your questions planned, and I would encourage you to do that beforehand, so that does require a little bit of prep work. But write the sentence on the board and read it to your students.

So this could be something that you are doing in the middle of your reading. Once you get to that sentence, it could be something that you could do at the end of the text, and you could revisit that sentence, but write the sentence on the board, read it to your students, and then prompt your students to find words or phrases in that sentence that are going to answer your targeted question. And then, of course, have students either work with partners or individually to answer questions.

This is a great sort of activity to use the mini whiteboards where you ask a question, they write their answer on the whiteboard, you can see all of their responses, and then you can discuss it. So that’s it. That’s the routine. It’s simple. It takes less than five minutes. But this routine is going to help your students really strengthen their understanding of the grammar concepts that you focus on. And it is also really going to help them understand the sentence and the text on a deeper level, which is going to support their comprehension.

So I need you to give me your full attention because I want to walk you through what this routine could look like. And obviously in an ideal world, you would be able to see the sentence that I’m about to share with you. But obviously, since this is a podcast, we are somewhat limited since it’s only audio, but I’m going to share an example with you. So you have to really, you know, tune in to your listening comprehension skills. So that way you can visualize what this looks like.

Now, one of the books that I loved reading with my fourth grade students was a Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. And this is just a really great picture book. And it tells a story of a young girl who is really scared by thunderstorms. And the story takes place on the girl’s grandmother’s farm and the grandmother is really trying to help her overcome her fear of storms by engaging her in this special tradition.

And together the girl and her grandmother they have to gather the ingredients to make this thunder cake and they have to be able to complete this task before the storm arrives. So it’s a really great story has lots of good language and it can talk about lots of themes.

But one of the sentences from the story. It’s actually two sentences. I’m going to read it to you And then we’re going to break it down. So here’s the sentence. “Perfect,” grandma cooed, “just perfect.” She beamed as she added the last strawberry to the glistening chocolate frosting on top of our thunder cake.

So you’d write that sentence on the board, show it to your students read it to them, and then you’d ask them questions. So one of the easiest questions you could ask your students is which words answer the question Who? And more than likely, your students would quickly respond with grandma.

But this sentence also uses the pronouns she a couple different times. So now this is an opportunity for you to discuss pronouns and the role that pronouns play in writing, and we can talk about who she is referring to, and you know how she’s replacing grandma in that second sentence.

Okay, I’m gonna reread the sentence so that way it can be fresh in your mind. “Perfect,” Grandma cooed, “just perfect.” She beamed as she added the last strawberry to the glistening chocolate frosting on top of our thunder cake. So the next question you could ask your students is which words tell us what grandma was doing? And if students are looking at that sentence, they would identify that there’s really three verbs grandma cooed, she beamed, and she added.

So this gives you an opportunity to talk about verbs, but specifically verb tenses, all three of those verbs and with -ed, so that’s a sign that they are obviously in the past tense. So you could talk about the different types of verbs. And you can even use this as an opportunity to talk about Subject Verb Agreement.

Okay, I’m gonna read that one more time and share one more example of a question you could ask. “Perfect,” Grandma cooed, “just perfect.” She beamed as she added the last strawberry to the glistening chocolate frosting on top of our thunder cake. So you can ask your students which word tells us what kind of frosting? And so students would answer chocolate and glistening.

So this is an opportunity for you to talk about how adjectives really help the reader visualize the text and they add more details. And, you know, oftentimes, you can use more than one adjective to describe something, you know, so if the sentence just said, she added the last strawberry to the frosting, it’s like, okay, well what type of frosting we don’t know what type of but when we add the word chocolate, now we can visualize the color of the frosting. And it gives us a much better picture of the cake. But we can also anticipate what the flavor would be like.

But when we add in that additional adjective of glistening, then we can picture that it is a shiny, shimmering cake. And we can talk about how adjectives can also be used to describe other adjectives.

So in this one sentence, it’s really two sentences. But in this one example, with our students, we were able to discuss nouns and pronouns, verb tenses, and subject verb agreement, and adjectives. But there are so many other grammar concepts that you could cover in this same example.

You could talk about dialogue and rules for using quotation marks. You could talk about punctuation, and when to use commas and periods. You could talk about capitalization rules, you could talk about independent and dependent clauses, you could talk about prepositional phrases, and really so much more.

So the reality is that the sentences that our students read and write are filled with endless opportunities to really highlight and teach grammar. So let me challenge you this week and really the rest of the year, this is a good opportunity for you to practice something new, try to rely less on grammar worksheets, and instead, spend more time embedding grammar into your reading and writing lessons. And then hopefully the strategy that I shared with you today, we’ll help you do that.

So as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Before we go, let me ask you a huge favor. You know, if you enjoy listening to the Stellar Teacher Podcast, and especially if you tune in on a regular basis, would you consider doing two things for me? First of all, leave a review on Apple podcasts telling me how much this podcast has helped or inspire you. The more reviews we have, the easier it is for new listeners to find the podcast.

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