Grammar to go - Gringotts Wizarding Bank Warning

Av Vegard Melum

Grade: 7^th

Number of students: 26
Time: 60 minutes

Grammar to go is a technique teachers can use when working with a text to give students and pupils a better understanding of grammar without focusing solely on the grammar aspect. What a teacher would do with this technique is up to each teacher to decide. In our practise period this spring, Markus, Marikken and I worked with modern literature and the topic of fantasy. This was because fantasy is a theme that appealed to the majority of the 7^th graders we taught. We used this genre when teaching English (A massive project, covering almost every competence aims), Physical Education (Quidditch) and Arts and Crafts (Making their own fantasy object/item). Since fantasy was our main topic this period it was only fitting that our “Grammar to go”- teacher’s scheme had to play out on the same field. We decided to work with grammar through a poem from J.K. Rowling’s bestseller “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, more specifically the warning sign from “Gringotts Wizarding Bank”.

Enter, stranger, but take heed
Of what awaits the sin of greed
For those who take, but do not earn
Must pay most dearly in their turn
So if you seek beneath our floors
A treasure that was never yours
Thief, you have been warned, beware
Of finding more than treasure there.

This poem is warning sign for all those who dares to enter Gringotts Wizarding Bank with intentions of taking something that is not theirs to take.

We began our teacher’s scheme by handing out the poem and talking to the students and asking them where they thought this poem came from. A couple of our pupils had already read the Harry Potter franchise and was familiar with terms such as “Gringotts, Dragons and goblins”, while others had not. We knew however, that most of them had watched the movies, so we presented a short movie teaser we made from the Harry Potter franchise to get them exited and to get some thoughts rolling. The pupils were immediately intrigued and wanted more, so Markus read the poem aloud, line by line and translated it, while the pupils wrote the translation above the pre-existing poem. We then went through the most difficult words, asking them what they meant, explained the meaning of the poem as a whole- linked up to the movie teaser, and practiced some of the most difficult words and sounds. Some of these words and sounds were: “Stranger, heed, awaits, sin, greed, earn, dearly, beneath, treasure, thief, warned and beware”. When teaching the sounds I sat on the desk in a relaxed position and had them repeat after me. For instance, I said “awaits”- and while doing so I also exaggerated the “aw” [Awaits], so that the pupils would get a better understanding of why it is pronounced that way, instead of with regular “v” [Avaits]. I think this was a good idea, because I did not want the pupils to feel like they were being taught, and rather like it was just a fun exercise.

In the second half of the 60 minutes we had available, we started talking about word classes and asked the pupils if they could name some. They all knew many of the classes in Norwegian but struggled with the English translations, such as “Substantiv” and “Nouns”. As the pupils mentioned the different word classes, we wrote them on the blackboard and asked them what they were and meant. For example, if a pupil mentioned the word class “verbs”, we would ask: “What is that?”- and they would reply, “It’s something you do”. By asking questions and following up on their answers they got a better understanding of what the different classes was all about.

Marikken, Markus and I believe that learning by doing is a great concept, so for the last part of this lesson we presented the assignments. The pupils were supposed to draw a green circle around all the verbs and a red circle around the nouns. We might have explained the task a bit fast, because some a couple of the pupils did not know what to do, or what a word class was, when we told them to start. In my experience, there will always be a few who does not pay attention during the presentation or lecture. However, by showing them the movie teaser in the beginning of the class, I think we got more attention from the pupils than if we had not.

When they had circled all the verbs and nouns, they had to place them in boxes. The verb boxes contained the tenses: “Infinitive, Past tense and “Present tense”. Here, each pupil had to place the verbs they found in the poem into the correct box. For instance if they found the word “Enter”- they would have to put it the “Infinitive” box, and then write the verb in the rest of the tenses. [Infinitive] Enter à [Past Tense] Entered à [Present tense] Entering.

With the nouns it was almost the same drill, except here they had to place them in the “Singular box” or in the “Plural box”. For example “Floors” which is plural. [Singular] Floor à [Plural] à Floors.
Suddenly our 60 minutes had flown by, and it was time to finish.

When looking back at our teaching scheme I see it as a great experience. It was something different and new, which neither the pupils nor us had tried before. There were a few thing we could have done differently. For starters we could have used a whole lesson focusing on for example nouns, instead of trying to teach as many topics as we could in one lesson (We worked with verbs, nouns, pronunciation to name a few). The second thing we could have done better was to stick to the time schedule or we could have used this scheme in a double lesson. Although the pupils was in need of a good presentation, we could have devoted a little more time to the assignments. All in all, I thought this was a great experience, I and would like to use a scheme much like this in the future if I was going to teach young minds about grammar.