For the Love of Grammar!

By Adrin Fisher

Not to date myself, but when I was in eighth grade, there was this thing called diagramming sentences.  There was a lot of diagramming sentences in my English class:  we headed to the blackboard and grabbed some chalk with our homework papers held in sweaty fists, filling the boards with slanted lines bearing adjectives. At first it was stressful, like speaking a new language, but after a while it became—dare I say—fun.  How exciting it was to command a sentence! To make words march to their exact spots! To say, you, word, are definitely a predicate adjective separated from the verb by a slanted half line.  You, word, are a subordinate conjunction floating between clauses.  Victory!

Image via Capital Community College Foundation http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/

As time passed, though, diagramming sentences—a staple in English classrooms for decades—began to fall out of favor. Really, in my experience, grammar instruction itself began to fall out of favor.  I started my career in Western New York teaching 11^th grade—Regents Exam year.  At that time, the English Regents Exam (one of five capstone tests students had to pass to graduate from high school) was changing.  On the older test, there was a section of spelling, a section of grammar and usage, and some reading passages.  The year I started, the exam transitioned to four essays.  Grammar was now judged via writing.

After I moved home to West Virginia, the same sort of transition followed.  As a 7^th grade teacher I was given grammar and spelling books, but needed to bring more reading into the curriculum to prepare for the end-of-year state test.  I hung onto the grammar book for the first year or so, but started to let major grammar instruction fade into the background.  Let’s face it, teachers:  it’s hard to make the difference between a demonstrative pronoun and an indefinite pronoun fancy.  It’s hard to maintain student interest in rote, isolated grammar instruction with drill and skill sheets.  And, why struggle?

We educators struggle because we know empirically that grammar instruction is imperative.  Obviously, we want our students to leave high school sounding educated.  WE educated them, after all.  We know that those high school bugaboos—the SAT and the ACT—have sneaky little questions about semicolons and the-best-way-to-rewrite-this-sentence.

But how to make grammar instruction palatable?  Grammar books are long gone from most of our classrooms, though WV’s current College and Career Readiness Standards do sneak in requirements like the correct usage of absolute phrases (grade 10).

And more importantly—how to make grammar instruction stick?

Enter one solution:  Daily Grammar Practice.

I first learned about DGP from the author of the materials, a Georgia high school teacher named Dawn Burnette, at a High Schools That Work conference in Atlanta about five years ago.  She showed the program she’s put together over many years of trial and error.  In Daily Grammar Practice, you start with a sentence on a Monday.  That day, you analyze the sentence for parts of speech.  Tuesday you pick up the same sentence, but you mark the functions (direct objects, transitive verbs). Wednesday is the same sentence—today you identify clauses and name the purpose and type. Thursday you capitalize and punctuate it correctly, and Friday you diagram.  All this embedded instruction in only five minutes per day?!  I made a beeline to her booth and bought the manual.

I should state here that I’m not receiving a kickback from DGP Publishing, nor would I ask for one.  I believe that teachers should help teachers, and this post is my way of connecting teachers to resources.

I should state that I believe in the seamless way DGP fits into English classrooms (bell ringers, anyone?) so much that I advocated my district purchasing manuals for six grade levels of teachers.

I should admit that in my high school, most of our English teachers are adherents to this program—and it’s caused changes in students’ writing, their understanding of foreign language, and their ability to converse with us teachers about problems in their writing.

And I should admit that I win because I don’t have to design and then suffer through a two-week grammar unit that the kids won’t remember anyway. And that one year when I had some basketball players in my senior class who chanted “D-G-P” in the cafeteria? That was a win too.

When you purchase the manual, you get everything you need—first and most importantly, the tips of the actual teacher who wrote and implements the actual program.  You get daily student note sheets, teaching points (read: “topics for mini-lessons”) on each sentence, scope and sequence through 12 grade levels, pretests, and a way to record participation.  You learn Burnette’s philosophy:  grammar instruction should be like a daily vitamin.  That’s the only way grammar gets into long term memory.

Burnette’s good-humored and practical advice.

Teaching points are first; I model each day for each class.

So, if you are struggling with the “right” way to teach what most students don’t particularly want to learn, I’d encourage you to look into DGP.  You’ll see results.  And you’ll get to introduce a new generation of students to the powerful graphic organizer that is sentence diagramming.

And some of them will even say it’s fun.  I promise.

This student was so proud of her progress, she made a certificate for me to present to her! Win!

Here’s the link to Burnette’s company if you’d like to check it out:   www.dgppublishing.com  No pressure, though.  This whole piece is my personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions of my school, my school district, WVCTE, or WVDE.  I just wanted to make this resource known to the tribe of teachers that tunes in here.

Adrin Fisher is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. When she’s not managing lively discussions, modeling assignments, or conferencing with budding writers, you can find her hanging out with her kids, reading Billy Collins, or rifling through used books for her classroom library. You can follow her on Twitter @fisheradrin

WVCTE wants to know your struggles with teaching grammar. How do you help students retain it? What advice can you offer your colleagues? Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!

Self Pages: Making Students a Part of the Curriculum

Sitting down at night (for maybe the very first time all day), my legs still feel like they’re moving, my feet still pounding against the hard, tiled floors of my classroom as I dance from one side to the other, gesticulating in sweeping motions that match the fire and energy of my speech, imploring—no, commanding!—the eyes watching to take the stage with me. We each dance our own version of this ballet across the floors of our classrooms every single day, and it is tiring work however rewarding. And tired is certainly the word that echoes the loudest in my skull right now, winding down after the first couple of weeks back on the stage.

But this isn’t about being tired, really. It’s about the things we no longer do after we wind down. Gone are the discussions of rules and expectations, gone are the days of settling students into a routine, and gone are the days of introductory activities and ice breakers. We sometimes have a tendency to stop trying to deliberately learn our students after the obligatory first day introduction activities—not consciously or with intent; we just get caught up in all the busy, and “getting to know you” doesn’t always figure into the curriculum of the day. We learn who our kids are in the little and subtle ways that come with spending day after day with one another, but it’s just as important for students to continue to see that interest, care, and investment in who they are reflected in the curriculum. While doing some reading this summer, I came across a brilliant activity that provides such an opportunity, and I wanted to share with you this activity and my experience with it.

Deborah Dean introduces the idea of Self Pages in Strategic Writing as a way to introduce the reading technique “Observe, Question, Compare” (OQC) to engage students with mentor texts. The mentor text Dean uses in this instance is Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers by James Gulliver Hancock, who utilizes images and words to create biographical collages of sorts about famous people. I began by splitting students into groups of five and distributing the same set of images from Hancock’s text to each group, asking them to make observations about each Self Page, question why each page might include some things and leave out others and why each page was arranged the way it was, and to compare the pages to one another. Their goal was to compile a list of common characteristics as a group, which we then used to build a master list of “requirements” for Self Pages as a class. What they came up with included: combination of words and images, limited color palette (2 or 3 max), the person’s head/body is the most prominent feature of the page, accomplishments, goals/dreams/hopes, education, career, family/friends, likes and dislikes, fears, habits, important places lived/traveled, illnesses/major life struggles, etc. I announced that they had just collectively written their next assignment and charged them with the task of creating their own Self Pages (about themselves) that adhered to the characteristics listed on the board. In addition to the opening image, here are just a few of the amazing pieces my kids brought to the table:

As a follow-up, I asked them to write a reflective piece about what their Self Page had revealed about them—what had they learned about themselves? Of course, we also took the time to share our work and the multitude of stories the images inspired, and the entire class period was spent simply exchanging stories (which I had not really intended but happily reveled in).  What I learned about my students in those ninety minutes of swapping stories would have never happened had I not opened the door to it, had I not made thema part of my own curriculum. And what they learned about me was that I had stories too. I constantly seek to humanize myself in front of my kids, to shatter that weird façade of teacher as knowledge-giver, teacher as know-it-all, teacher as not-student. I want them to know that I’m just me, and I’m there to learn just as much as they are. And, more importantly, they learn that there is a space for their voice in my room, that their voice will be listened to and valued, that it will be answered. And I continue to build up and reaffirm those beliefs as the semester continues.

The next day we took our first glance at Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and talked about the impact of pairing images and text and what happens when art and life intersect. Many students referred to their own Self Pages, which wallpaper the back of my classroom, throughout our conversation, already connecting and identifying with Junior before we have even begun reading the novel.

 

WVCTE is wondering what you do to make students a part of the curriculum! Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!

 

Sarah Krause teaches Honors Sophomore English and Dual-Credit Senior English at Hurricane High School. Beginning her career as a full-time instructor for Marshall University, Sarah is entering her fifth year in public education. If she is not in the classroom, grading papers, or conducting research, Sarah enjoys working on developing her professional website and blog at www.evolutionizingeducation.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @teachtwdchange. 

Day of the Week Bell-Ringers: How to Teach Vocabulary and Grammar Consistently and Productively

BY: LIZ KEIPER

Here’s a list of three (of the many) things I struggled with as an English teacher during my first few years of teaching:

• How to teach vocabulary in a meaningful context in a way so that students would actually learn the words and incorporate them into their schema of understanding, not just memorize definitions for a quiz and forget them
• How to teach grammar in a meaningful context in a way so that students would actually learn parts of speech and sentence structure and incorporate them into their schema of understanding, not just memorize grammar for a quiz and forget it
• How to make bell-ringers meaningful… point blank

Bell-ringers used to be an afterthought for me. At the end of my nightly lesson planning, I would cook up a question pertaining to what we had learned in class the day before. It was a constant stressor, and my questions never seemed to build knowledge the way that I wanted them to.

So, I decided to kill all three of the aforementioned birds with one stone. Not that I advocate animal cruelty… but I do advocate using bell-ringers to teach both vocabulary and grammar acquisition!

For the past few years, I have structured my bell-ringers for class according to days of the week. This helps give the students structure because they know what to generally expect for a bell-ringer on any given day, and this has helped me as well because I can create a swathe of bell-ringers a week at a time rather than having to create them day by day based on what we covered the previous day. Here is a break down of how I structure my bell-ringers each day of the week:

• Mondays: I introduce the vocabulary word of the week. I project a PowerPoint slide that shows the word for the week, the part of speech, the definition of the word, and an example sentence using the word. I have the students copy all of this onto their bell-ringer sheets. *Ninja-Teacher Move: the vocabulary word is one that will be crucial in our reading for the week #trickyteacherstatus #planningahead*
• Tuesdays: I give the students another sentence using the same vocabulary word for the week. Now, they’ve seen the word used in context two days in a row. I also give them a part of speech to find in the sentence. So, Tuesdays are Grammar Days! In the beginning of the year, I start out having students find nouns in the sentence, then verbs, then adjectives, then prepositions, and so on. In the second semester, once they have a good handle on parts of speech, then I can begin to teach them about different types of clauses and what makes a sentence a complete sentence along with proper comma usage. I have found that this is a good progression in which to teach grammar which ensures that students have necessary background knowledge to understand the comparatively complex components of grammar.
• Wednesdays: On Wednesdays, we write sentences! (And sometimes, we wear pink 😉) I have the students write their own sentence using the same word of the week from Monday. The catch is that they have to use the word in a way that shows me that they understand what the word means. If the word is “placid,” they can’t just write “I am placid” for their sentence because they could write that same sentence for literally any adjective without understanding the meaning of it. If they try to get away with a sentence like that, I tell them to put it in context, such as, “I am placid when I am relaxing watching TV.” I then have a few students share their sentences. So, students have 3-5 exposures to the vocabulary word in various contexts in this one bell-ringer alone.
• Thursdays: Thursday is a bit of a break from vocabulary. On this day, I typically give students a literary device and its definition along with an example. *Ninja-Teacher Move: the literary device is one that will be crucial in our reading for the week #suchtrickymuchwow #planningskills*
• Fridays: Friday is my students’ favorite because it’s Free Choice Friday! I give my students at least two different choices as to what they can do with their bell-ringers on Fridays. At least one choice is always drawing a picture which illustrates the vocabulary word for the week. This gives them additional exposure to the vocabulary word in another context, and my artistically inclined students typically choose this option. I’ve had students who have created running comic strips throughout the year involving a character showing each vocab word of the week in drawing form! Other options for Free Choice Friday sometimes involve creating a second sentence (different from Wednesday’s sentence) using the vocab word, or sometimes I give students a creative option using a story that we are reading, such as, “If you were directing a movie version of The Odyssey, name a famous actor whom you would cast as one of the characters,” or “Pick a theme song for one of the characters in Romeo and Juliet.” This is a fun way to give students choice in bell-ringers.

At the end of every marking period, I give my students a quiz on all of the vocabulary and grammar that they’ve learned during the marking period. Because we have revisited each word and built upon each grammar concept, they generally do well on these quizzes.

Here are some reasons why I love this bell-ringer system so much:

• Pre-Made System: I know on any day what my bell-ringer is going to be. No more late-night, “Oh no! I forgot to make a bell-ringer question! What on earth can I ask my students to answer at the beginning of class tomorrow??”
• Making Time for Grammar: I found that in my first few years of teaching, grammar instruction went largely by the wayside because I would get so wrapped up in reading and writing instruction that I would forget to address it directly. I tried doing a mini-unit on grammar mid-year, but I felt like the information bounced off students and didn’t sink in because we dove into it for a week and then never addressed it again. Teaching grammar through bell-ringers has forced me to both revisit it weekly and to teach it in an order that prepares students later in the year to discuss complex ideas such as clauses.
• Reinforcing Vocabulary: In my first few years of teaching, I also felt like my students never really ingested vocabulary. I would give them a slew of vocabulary words all at once, periodically review them, quiz them on the words, and move on with life. I felt like they memorized the words for the quiz but never owned them in a way that enabled them to use the words in context. This system exposes students to so many contexts of the word in the span of a week that they come away with a deep understanding of the word, which I think is better than lightly exposing them to many words that they’re not going to remember anyway.

Here is a copy of the sheet that I give students to record their bell-ringers. Each day of the week has a spot for the bell-ringer and for a Learning Log (which is a question that I have them answer at the end of each class period as closure—this functions as a quick formative assessment to show that they understood the main point of the lesson from the day). I collect and grade these sheets every two weeks. Then, I hand them back to the students so that they can use the sheets to study for their vocabulary and grammar quizzes every marking period, which in turn shows the students that the bell-ringers are meaningful.

Bell-ringer sheet

If you are searching for a better bell-ringer system for your classroom, I highly suggest that you try a daily system like this which incorporates vocabulary and grammar! Let’s activate students’ language learning at the beginning of every class period—as soon as the bell rings.

Liz Keiper is a contributing blogger for WVCTE. When she’s not dressing up in togas or running around her classroom with foam swords reenacting Shakespeare, she can be found enjoying the great outdoors, playing guitar, or adding to her rather out-of-control rubber duck collection. You can follow her on Twitter @KeiperET1.

WVCTE is wondering…

• Do you have a bell-ringer system that works well for you? Share it with us!
• How do you teach vocabulary and grammar in a deep, meaningful way in your classroom?

Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!

There’s So Much Beauty in Dirt

By: Jessica Michael Bowman

“There’s so much beauty, it could make you cry”

– So Much Beauty In Dirt by Modest Mouse

It’s no secret that teaching is work. Hard, sacred, rewarding work. This time of the year, as the shine of newness has just begun to wear off and a hum of hope still hangs in the air, this universal truth is subtly acknowledged. We are all drawing a collective breath. We pause, holding it in, and exhale slowly. Then we roll up our sleeves, ready to begin our great work, and pause again. We are so often confronted by the thought, There is so much work to be done.

Teaching can be the very stuff of exhaustion. Physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Sometimes, if we’re being honest, it is pure toil. While we’ve lovingly and painstakingly stocked our classroom libraries with care and begun to build the foundations of the relationships with our students that will transform our lives for the next several months, there might be a tiny part of us that also already feels like we’re about to begin a great quest, fraught with peril, insurmountable joy, and life lessons. And while we know there are friendships to be forged and battles to be won, we might also find ourselves already feeling the wear of the long journey ahead.

Like, I said: teaching can be toil. When I close my eyes, imagining this word, I feel the beads of sweat. I see the dirt-stained hands. I roll up my sleeves and I pause. This year, as the dirt and sweat intermingle (and with a little help from Matt de la Pena and Modest Mouse) I am remembering to see the beauty, too.

Let me explain…

This past May I was chaperoning my school’s end of the year trip to the pool.  I was running around tirelessly with sunscreen trying to prevent sunburns, looking for any signs of possible drowning, and trying to avoid being pushed in the water by my giddy, sun-crazed third graders. At the end of an admittedly taxing day, I stood in the hot afternoon heat, drenched in sweat with trash bag in hand. I had been given the glamorous task of gathering the discarded garments and other belongings from the dank, sopping floor of the pool’s dressing room. As I went about my work, fielding through the grass and dirt, tossing strewn trash and pitching half-eaten scraps into the trash can, I looked around in that moment, end-of-the-year-teacher-tired, and felt the weight of the toil. This job did not feel beautiful. I felt surrounded by dirt.

That’s when I spotted her. One of our parent chaperones was making a beeline for me with such purpose and intention that I was certain I had forgotten a child at school or thrown away food that was, in fact, still someone’s meal. Did I accidentally throw her child’s flipflop into the this garbage bag? WOULD I HAVE TO FISH IT OUT?!

“I need to tell you something,” she began and my heart stopped. I can’t handle this right now, I thought. At times this year had been too bittersweet for me. I’d worked so hard and felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything, constantly wondering if I was making any difference in the lives of my students. As a new mother and a teacher, I had battled balance, doubt and inadequacy. Unfortunately, often times I had lost.

I steeled myself for entry into the dark garbage bag of uncertainty. “I want to thank you for making my daughter a reader this year,” she continued. And from there she began to describe the impact the culture of literacy in our classroom had on her daughter, and consequently on her younger siblings as well. Her words were purposeful and sincere. They were such a stark contrast from the frame of mind I was in that at first I stared at her blankly, taken aback.

In that moment, surrounded by “dirt,” there was so much beauty that I started to cry.

This is where my students would be BURSTING to turn and talk, because this memory has all of the makings of a text-to-text connection and is a prime example of how conflict reveals a character to herself and the reader. However, for me this is above all a lesson about perspective.

In one of our favorite read alouds and mentor texts, Last Stop on Market Street by the ever amazing Matt de la Pena, CJ is begrudgingly venturing to an unnamed destination he and his Nana visit each Sunday. While the reader doesn’t find out what this stop is until the end, the real value and intention is in the journey there. Along the way, CJ peppers the pages with complaints about many undesirable situations. They’re out in the rain, they don’t own a car and have to take the bus instead, and the area they’re traveling to is full of dilapidated buildings, crumbling sidewalks, and boarded up windows.

“Sometimes when you’re surrounded by dirt, CJ, you’re a better witness for what’s beautiful.” – Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Pena

In each situation they encounter, Nana offers the reader a vastly different perspective. As one of my students shared, “She sees the beauty around her, even when it’s hard to see.” As a mentor text for studying perspective and character development, it’s effective. As a source of inspiration to a reader, it is powerful.

Here I am in August, at the beginning of a new school year, learning the value of this lesson all over again.  While I’m not holding a trash bag of wet clothes or gleaning discarded trash with a countdown to summer break on my desk, I find myself intimidated by the year ahead of me. Teaching, and many of the less glamorous tasks that come with it, is hard work. And although we toil, sweat drenched and dirt stained, we are surrounded by such striking beauty.

So as the tumbleweeds blow through the back to school supply aisles, the coffee intake spikes, our calendars fill up, and we begin the business of literacy, I want to encourage you and challenge your perspective. It’s not that our work is “dirty,” undesirable, or void of enjoyment. In contrast, we pour so much of our energy and heart into what we do, carrying a mental load that can at times by overwhelming. It’s easy to become weighted down by the many demands of legislation, disheartened by the data, or exhausted from treading the waters of work-life balance. This “dirt” that comes along with what we do doesn’t negate the beauty that we are surrounded by. Those moments when students find their love of reading, or you recognize them as empathetic peers and critical thinkers – I know the work that goes behind it. I see how tired you will become – tired, beloved and rewarded.

Teachers are some of the hardest workers I know. We inhabit some of the most sacred spaces within our communities, while serving its most precious members. And while the journey is long, and the effort demanding, we are witnesses with front row seats to some of the most moving beauty we could hope to experience.

Jessica Michael Bowman is a literacy coach for Berkeley County Schools, unabashed bibliophile, and advocate of lifelong literacy. When she’s not coaching teachers, teaching students, or blogging for WVCTE, she’s probably crying over a book. Aside from literacy, her other loves of life are traveling with her family and adding to her music collection. You can connect with her on Twitter @JMichaelBowman5.

WVCTE is wondering… What beauty are you witnessing in your classrooms? 

Leave us a comment, Tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!

We Can All Be Writers

Penny Kittle absolutely ruined reading for me five years ago.

You heard me. Destroyed it.

In the summer of 2013, at the University of New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, Penny taught me how to read like a writer. Our class studied short poems and discussed the deliberation of the author’s diction with a sense of wonder rather than through the lens of “what does this symbol mean?”. We read whole books in book clubs and gave a presentation about our texts on simply its craft. We wrote process papers at the end of the class that told the story of how we’d written our final essays.

Something about this made me absolutely unable to mindlessly read anything anymore. Online articles, advertisements, tweets, and even beach-appropriate fiction just screamed CRAFT ANALYSIS!!!! at me. I couldn’t really relax and let go while reading anymore–instead, I was hypersensitive to the words I read, thinking constantly about what the author had lived, and done, to write such a work.

The total immersion in craft study of those two weeks has stayed with me, five years later. In every book I read, I have a new appreciation for the work of the writer–the work of writing.

The craft of language, the power of literacy, is everywhere.

And seeing writing everywhere helped transform me from a lifelong reader into something more: a writer.

I start my day with the awesome Twitter crew at #5amwritersclub. Many participants are teachers, writing before they begin the day with their students, and many others are parents, writing before they begin the day with their children. I identify with both groups and love the sense of identity that comes from writing beside my tribe.

I feel the same way about writing in online communities like this blog. Every time a WVCTE post appears in my inbox, I think about not just what the post says, but also what my fellow teachers were thinking and doing as they wrote. I have watched our WVCTE President’s and Vice President’s thinking grow over time, since I’ve had the privilege of reading their writing. When Jess wrote about barnacle goose chicks (LOL!), and when Karla wrote about making time for what we value, I read beyond the “I agree” part of my teacher brain. I thought about those women, both moms, cramming in some writing after their kids’ bedtimes, or in the early morning hours before school, or on their too-packed planning periods.

This is, in part, what helped me shape my identity as a writer. I saw my peers, my friends, my teaching neighbors writing. I saw their process, their thinking, their methods translate into writing. It showed me what was possible: that I, too, was a writer.

Our students need to see this, too.

As we kick off this school year, we need to make not only our own writing processes visible–from initial thinking, to drafting, to tinkering, to publishing–but our students’ processes visible, too. Students who see one another write understand that it’s not a one-track process; writing can look different from one kid to the next, and from one school year to the next. The possibilities are endless.

We can all be writers. We should all be writers. Viewing the world so differently has no doubt made my brain more tired, but it has made my life so much more rich.

Believing that I could become a writer took time, a shift in my mindset, and lots of work…but it transformed my identity and introduced me to a whole community of writers I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and for that, I am forever grateful. I can only hope that my students someday can feel this sense of gratitude to the writers–both the teachers and students whose words they read, and the published poets and authors whose craft we study to get better–that I feel for every writer, every human, that I know.

Shana Karnes is a mom of two, an avid reader and writer, and someone whose life has been immeasurably bettered by literacy and all it entails. She is grateful to be part of the WVCTE community, and loves equally her NWP@WVU and Three Teachers Talk peers and pals. Connect with Shana on Twitter at @litreader.