Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In episode #19, I teach how to use a weekly (or daily!) grammar quiz as part of your language arts study. An ongoing grammar quiz in which students easily and incrementally memorize important grammar terms is the answer that I have found to that age-old problem of “What are prepositions again” every time students have a grammar worksheet finding all of the prepositions!
I’m sure you know how this goes:
- We have a lesson on coordinating conjunctions (cc) and compound sentences (CPS).
- We discuss FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So), the cc’s.
- We teach students that two sentences cannot be joined as one with simply a comma-only or a cc only.
- We do a few on the board.
- Then they get to the practice portion (assuming you are using a TPA—Teach-Practice-Apply—approach to instruction). Here they are supposed to place commas before the cc’s in sentences if the sentence has a complete sentence (CS) on each side.
- Hands go up all over the room: “What are the coordinating conjunctions again?”
(Check out my 8 Parts of Speech Posters and my Tricky Trick Posters to help with these as well! New products coming every week!)
And on and on…articles, coordinating conjunctions, being/helping/linking verbs, interjections, prepositions, subordinators…..we teach these only when they come up in a grammar assignment. But how does this help with writing?
- How will students write with compound sentences if they just have coordinating conjunctions once or twice a year?
- How will students determine subject-verb-agreement with intervening prepositional phrases (The girl, along with her brothers, was late.) if they simply have a couple of preposition lessons here and there and do not instantly recognize over 100 of the 200+ prepositions?
- How can students add interjection sentence openers or subordinate clause sentence openers if these grammar words are foreign to them?
- How can they know whether to use an adjective or an adverb with a being/helping/linking (BHL) verb if they don’t know BHL verbs?
- How will they write it is AN honor but A horse if they haven’t memorized articles/noun markers?
Specifically, in this episode, I use my Beginning Think Fast Grammar Quiz to teach teachers, parents, and teaching parents:
- How to introduce unfamiliar grammar terms
- The importance of incrementality
- The benefit of having an ongoing and repeating grammar quiz to keep important grammar terms at students’ fingertips
- How to help students utilize the grammar quiz’s Answer Key to LEARN these terms (and to evaluate their progress week by week)
- Much more!
(You will get a blank Beginning Think Fast Grammar Quiz—so you can use the Teacher’s Notebook over and over again to teach these grammar terms.)
I honestly cannot imagine teaching grammar/usage without the Beginning Think Fast Grammar Quiz for elementary and middle schoolers and the Advanced Think Fast Grammar Quiz for junior high and high schoolers! Listen or watch this episode to learn more about my WHY for these quizzes (or ones you create yourself).
It’s all here in this week’s HIT—where each week, I bring you tips, tricks, and techniques for teaching writing, language arts, grammar, and more (to grades two through twelve) drawing upon my 100+ curriculum books totaling over 50,000 pages.
And for your convenience, How I Teach…. is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a YouTube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)!
Note: This lesson came from Beginning Think Fast Grammar Quiz, a stand alone product available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
