I was wondering if anyone had some ideas on how to make grammar fun at the high school level. My kids are atrocious writers and I really would like to help them improve without it being so painful! Any suggestions are appreciated!
Re: Teaching grammar to LD kids at high school level
I, too, have found that to many students, reading their writing to themselves before and/or after they write it down is novel and instructive.
For a structured writing program that has lots of creative possibilities — but, happily, is also accessible to students with limited imaginations — I really like “When They Can’t Write” by Charlotte Morgan (http://www.yorkpress.com) . It starts with subject and predicate, a.k.a. noun & verb, and builds sentence knowledge from that. If you get the workbooks it also really cuts down on planning time — but it’s not Mindless Worksheets Of America, either. (And no, I don’t get a commission :))
Other good ideas are in Diana King’s book, something like Writing Skills for the Adolescent — more info from http://www.rlac.com
It has also been my experience that many of the layers of “fun” are layers of confusion — if somethign’s basically drill then I make it drill and balance it with another activity that isn’t, because it goes by a *whole* lot faster if you just drill it.
Well, now for the cranky point of view — maybe the reason your kids are such atrocious writers is that all their teachers wanted to do only things that are fun? And they thought, and taught the kids, that work and real learning are painful?
I do a lot of grammar these days, especially since I’m teaching both English and French as second languages. Except for my difficult student who hated anything and everything, my students generally find their grammar exercises to be a fun challenge.
It’s important to have a grammar exercise that’s on the right level — too easy and it’s a bore and waste of time, too hard and you get it all wrong and it is frustrating and a waste of time.
We work through the exercises together — easy to do in tutoring, but you can get lots and lots of examples and work together in the class.
Say, for example, take a few paragraphs of a reading and go around taking turns spotting the subject and verb of each sentence. Later, find examples of singular and plural, conjunctions, compound sentences, prepositional phrases, adjectives, adverbs. (one topic at a time!!) Type up and copy examples of bad writing (no names of course, and maybe change a few things to make them unidentifiable) and take turns correcting the errors. Work together on sentence combining — write out a story with only simple declarative sentences, and then work together to rewrite it combining the sentences to add interest and depth. If I were doing this, I would get a good grammar text (or ESL text) and use it as a framework to order the presentation on — do a class exercise on the idea using reading materials, until everyone feels comfortable with it, *then* after it has been taught, give the text exercise as homework/individualclasswork — as opposed to the common practice of giving the exercise cold as a test so that the kids are just set up to do badly.
For writing, I do something that seems second nature to me, but to my students it is a novel radical concept: SAY your sentence out loud before you write it down. Then re-read it aloud to see if you wrote what you meant to say. True this slows you down — just remember there is no value whatever in a fast mistake. This will get rid of the non-thinking errors at least; then you have to work on ungrammatical speech patterns separately.