Teaching Grammar-to-go

By Helene Lundberg

For the last four weeks, me and my practice group have been teaching two 5th grade classes, with around 25 pupils in each class. We have been working a lot with grammar, and during one lesson we practiced grammar-to-go. This lesson lasted for 45 minutes, and our aim for the pupils were to teach them adjectives. The pupils were working with adjectives through poems, marking adjectives in one poem and then creating their own poems.

«What is Sweeter?»

Honey is sweeter than sugar,
Coffee is stronger than tea,
Juice is better than water,
You can’t be smarter than me.

A peach is sweeter than a cake,
A sea is deeper than a lake,
A boy is noisier than a bee,
A girl is shorter than a tree.

Peaches are softer than apples,
Carrots are better than rice,
Oranges are bigger than lemon,
Nothing is colder than ice.

During the lesson, the pupils were supposed to find adjectives in one poem and later create their own poems by using adjectives. Eskil began our lesson with introducing the aim of the lesson on the whiteboard and repeating what poems are. Eskil then read the poem and the pupils translated it. Afterwards Karita asked if the pupils remembered what nouns are and asked if they could see any nouns in the first verse. Pupils got to circle the nouns from the poem on the smartboard, and asked if anyone could find the adjectives and circle them as well.

The pupils then worked individually with a worksheet. The first exercise contained finding rhymes, and circling the nouns and adjectives. If pupils were early finished, we asked them to conjugate the adjective from the comparative form to the absolute form. On the other side of the worksheet, exercise two asked them to fill in adjectives into another poem. The pupils began filling in words by themselves, but if we saw that they were struggling we handed them a paper with examples of adjectives. This really helped and encouraged some weaker pupils.

My main role in this lesson was to finish it. The pupils and I looked at the aim written on the whiteboard, “To know at least 5 English adjectives”. Karita and Eskil handed out small notes, and I told the pupils to write down five adjectives on the note. The pupils handed me the notes when they left the classroom. I would say something like “Everyone wearing something green can leave.” or “Everyone with long hair can leave.” In that way I got to use some more adjectives.

  

  

I would say the pupils managed this lesson well, but our practice group did misunderstood some points of grammar-to-go. Grammar-to go is about teaching pupils grammar without them realizing that they are working with grammar. Therefor we did not give the class any lecture on how to conjugate adjectives. As we can see in the two first images, the pupils have only removed the "er" at the end of the adjective in comparative form. Shorter became short, and stronger became strong, other words were more tricky. For the word "better" most of the class wrote "better" or "bett" instead of good. We spoke about this in class after they had worked with the worksheet, and many corrected themselves then. For the word "noisier" almost all pupils wrote "noisi", they just removed the "er". However, for the word "bigger" most pupils wrote "big" instead of "bigg", I think the reason is because "big" is a word they are familiar with, and that they know it is supposed to be written like that. The pupils did reach the aim of the lesson, which was to know at least five adjectives. We checked this by using the exit notes, see the pictures below. Almost everyone in the class wrote down adjectives, I think one or two wrote down a noun as well. Some pupil only wrote down five different colours, while others wrote down adjectives from the poem. 

  

To improve this grammar-to-go lesson there are several things we can do and change. We should not have mentioned any of the word classes by name, like noun and adjective. In that way, the pupils would be less aware that they are working with grammar. During this lesson we could have worked more with pronunciation, but there is a limit with how much you can do with 45 minutes. We did, however, use the next lesson to practice pronunciation and speaking in English. I also think that we could teach them some more about adjectives and how to conjugate them. It would perhaps make more sense to the pupils why the adjectives in the first exercise was written in comparative. 

I think this lesson scheme worked out well in the class, but I do not think we need grammar-to-go to teach pupils grammar. This class really like grammar, and I therefor do not see any point in hiding it into another lesson theme like poem. We worked with verbs in class, and there were many pupils who told us they loved working with it, even irregular verbs. I give this lesson thumbs up. There are always something to improve, and it was not a great grammar-to-go lesson, but the pupils really enjoyed it. They did not find it too difficult, but challenging enough. I saw several pupils who were really excited about their own "monster-poem". They were reading it with great enthusiasm to each other when they were suppose to pack their bags.  They got to work with poems, grammar and creative work by filling in their own adjectives. I think I still would like to focus more on the grammar and teach the pupils about the word class before they are suppose to practise it.