How to Make Grammar Appealing

In this example from Grammar and Creativity Anubis and the idea of a time-slip story is used to encourage the student to think about the format of plays.

Are Teachers Qualified to Teach Grammar?

So many teachers in the UK (perhaps you can tell me about your experience in your country) were not, themselves, taught grammar explicitly when they were of school age during the 1970s and 80s.  You can understand the reasoning.  Children acquire the rules of English, certainly sufficiently well, simply by listening and joining in.  You will hear evidence of this going on when a child uses a word like drived or sheeps.  Clearly, they have spotted some rules: how to make the past tense and how to make a singular noun plural.  It just so happens that the verb and noun in these particular cases are irregular - they break the rules.

As a result of their own schooling, therefore, during which they felt they got by, teachers might feel cautious about throwing themselves wholeheartedly into teaching grammar.

What, I think, we should not do, however, is turn that caution into a justification and an argument for not teaching grammar.  There are a range of resources and there is support for professional development widely available.  Also, it doesn't have to be dry.  It doesn't have to be learning by rote.  Nor does it have to be in opposition to creative writing.  It should be part of the exciting, colourful landscape children experience along the road of their imagination, on the way to putting the words down on paper.  After all, children up to the age of eleven have to learn all sorts of technical concepts in other subjects: water cycle, condensation, femur, germination, meander, oxbow lake, trapezium, Venn diagram, and so on.

Why not allow children the right to experience a similarly academic approach to their own language.  Nothing is lost.

Grammar and Creativity: Rationale

Standing back and taking an analytical view of language allows you to look at its elements - essential for academic study.  As a practitioner in the classroom, however, you have to deal with both teaching the rules and terminology, and, at the same time, encouraging an enthusiasm for writing.  The only way to do that is to draw upon the child's creativity and value what they have to put down on paper.  This is how the introduction to Grammar and Creativity describes the approach that characterises the four books:

Good writing may start with an exciting idea, but it needs structure to make sense to a reader.  Grammar provides a framework on which to display the imagination.

Writing brings together individual expression and an understanding of the rules that allow our language (any language) to make sense.

This book has been written with the view that grammar and creativity go hand in hand to produce good writing.  Developing children’s understanding of the basics of English will encourage their literary adventures.   The range of activities here has been designed to excite interest as well as guide children and teachers through the rules.

For more information about the series for children aged seven to eleven years, go here: http://www.lcp.co.uk/grammar-and-creativity

Grammar Poster

At the beginning of each section - word, sentence, punctuation and text - in Grammar and Creativity, there is a poster that can be photocopied and glued inside each child's English writing book or enlarged for displaying in the classroom.  In the books, these are in black and white.  On the CDs, they are in colour.  Here is an example from the Year 5 CD: