Grammar to go a Humpty Dumpty’s song

By Tim-André Eriksen

Teaching children grammar can be a daunting task as well as a trying one. But it does not necessarily mean that it cannot be made into a fun activity. That is what grammar to go is all about; making something that pupils think is boring and useless to something fun and engaging. How this is done is with the use of a poem. This is a poem that the teacher should know quite well, in our case we used Humpty Dumpty’s Song by Lewis Carroll. In our group which consist of me, Maja and Sigve the focus was to use this poem to teach the fifth grade about word classes with a more focus on adjectives. So that is what this blog post will be about: What we did and how it went.

First things first: The preparation.

What we did with the poem was to identify every adjective, verb and noun since that is what we wanted to focus on with this class. After that we made a copy of the poem without the adjectives. This was because we wanted them to fill in new adjectives to see if they knew and understood what adjectives was. This was a class of about twenty-eight pupils, and what our practice teacher told us was that he had divided the class into three groups which was: Stage one (the weakest); Stage two and stage three (the strongest). So I had chosen to take the stage one group which had six students.  Before we started with our teaching scheme, we introduced the poem to the whole class.  We read for them first the two stanzas and then made them read it out loud. This was to make them more comfortable with the poem. We decided that we would read it every morning so they would memorize it. It should also be mentioned that our time was cut short because of other projects which we did not have control over so our time with the poem was sadly not as long as we had hoped for.

What I did.

After introducing this poem and reading out loud the first two stanzas, we started with the teaching scheme we had decided upon. We all made our own teaching scheme for the different groups we had. So I had my focus on stage one. I wanted first to read the whole poem with the group so I tried to read it for them, and then ask them to read after me. It did not go that well because they wanted to read more individually and not choral reading. What happened was that instead of choral reading I made them read one stanza each and translated them. This helped much more for the reluctant readers, since my group mainly had those. After that I made them repeat what kind of adjectives they found in the whole poem (we had just gone through a few stanzas with the whole class). This did not work as they had trouble finding adjectives. Because of this most of them lost focus and wanted to do something else. So the first try with the poem did not yield any good results. The second try went much smoother. This time the plan was to make them read it one stanza at a time, marking out those words they found difficult to understand (with a focus on adjectives) and looking them up in a dictionary. They were told that this was a competition so the first one to find the translation would win. These pupils loved competition so it made them focus a lot more. That made it more fun for them and in return they learned new words as well as looking up words in the dictionary. To try and see if they succeeded in understanding what an adjective was and come up with alternative adjectives for the poem, they received the poem without adjectives, only blank space where the adjectives should have been. Everyone in the group got one, and the task was simple: Write a new adjective on the blank space. The results varied, but the picture shows an example of what they were able to come up with:

The underlining goal was for the pupils to have some repetition on what adjective is and use some words they know to be used in the poem which they did. But if I had the chance to do it again I would have taken more into account the English abilities of the pupils. They were much weaker than I had anticipated which made them lose focus and the results were greatly diminished because of that. I should probably have spent more time having “fun” with the poem; making the pupils write a song, reading it in different voices or reading it one at a time from the start. What we also did before we started splitting them into groups was to identify verbs, nouns as well as adjectives. This was too much information at once for the pupils, so that as well made them lose motivation. I should maybe have focused only on adjectives for the lessons and when they started to feel comfortable we would introduce another word class. I could also have played more with the rhymes of the poem. The pupils seemed to enjoy the poem very much, so making them finding other adjectives which rhymes with the ones in the poem could probably have helped in the learning process.

In conclusion the grammar to go method showed great promise, but because of time constraints in addition to a rather poor execution from our side, the effect of it was diminished. They did however show to be more capable to write new adjectives on the poem which if we had more time could probably become even better as well as we could expand to more word classes. 

Sources:

Humpty Dumpty's Song by Lewis Carroll. Retrieved from:

http://www.storyit.com/Classics/JustPoems/humptysong.htm