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:

Grammar and Creativity

My series of four books for primary school teachers of English were launched on Monday.  Very exciting news!  My intention was to combine information on what all the terminology means and how to apply the concepts, along with an open-ended opportunity to write creatively.  Anyway, time will tell how teachers and their students respond to them.

The books are in black and white for easy photocopying, but each edition comes with a CD that replicates the text - only the illustrations are in colour for full impact on an interactive whiteboard.

 

Available from:  http://www.lcp.co.uk/primary-school/literacy/grammar-and-creativity 

Grammar and Creativity

Here is the front cover of my books in the new series on grammar for teachers.  I've illustrated all four books (for Years 3, 4, 5 and 6) in a way that, hopefully, will appeal to children and remove the dryness usually associated with the teaching and learning of the rules of English.  They are published by LCP who, as you probably know already, produce a great range of top-quality teaching resources.  I'd be grateful for any feedback on the cover design.

Aberdeen University Years - Grammar and Creativity

Somehow, I got myself to Aberdeen University.  The route was quite circuitous and doesn't need to be described here.  Coincidentally, having begun a lifetime of drawing with the help of bookmakers' chalk, I was working in Dan Flynn's betting shop when I was accepted on to the undergraduate course, which included English literature, politics and history, but mainly sociology.

From a standing start, having read hardly anything up until that point - I think I finished Black Beauty but gave up on Tom Sawyer - I was obliged to read the entire canon of significant 20th century fiction, as well as important case studies, theories, philosophical underpinnings and the methodologies of sociology.  Quite a task, but it was the perfect time for me to take it on.  (Also, I could do it in between the 'off' at Kempton Park and the results coming in from Uttoxeter.)  And it helped me to develop insights into my coal-mining community background and how people behave in interactions where there is unequal power.  The MA in sociology was followed up by an M.Phil from York University, where Laurie Taylor was the depaertment head.  Gradually, I found myself having clearer thoughts about language and education.

So, after long and varied career changes: a range of office work, university life, some time lecturing, then being a freelance toy designer and maker, children's writer and illustrator, and finally primary school teacher, I now find myself (sadly not being an outstanding rock guitarist) being the author and illustrator of four school books called Grammar and Creativity, published by LCP, with a planned launch date of 25 November 2013.  Yes, in just over two weeks time.

There are a few things I have to say about grammar and creativity, mainly because of misunderstandings on both sides of the traditionalist / romanticist fence.  I'll come to that soon.  Please leave any comments if you have any thoughts of your own.

No Books and no Habit

In a house where the only books available were a medical dictionary and The Encyclopaedia of Dogs, it's no surprise that I didn't develop a reading habit.  I could read of course and the local library was available, but I was more interested in picking up the chalk left by the bookmakers at the greyhound track, squirreling it away under the bed and taking it out to draw caricatures of the neighbours on the pavements of the cul-de-sac where I lived.

Increasingly, having no confidence in the way I spoke, drained my of personal confidence.  Playing with other kids in the street wasn't a problem.  We spoke the same language, but secondary school brought together children from different walks of life and, you might say, a different talking life too.  My parents were the same when they had to meet a teacher or headmaster: completely tongue-tied and unnecessarily and embarrassingly deferential.   But the fun was still to come.  University.

The Story of Grammar Continues.

Language has such power, culturally and personally.  The substance of thought, ideas and beliefs, it can enlighten as well as obscure. The expression of a nation's identity, it carries its history and re-shapes its past with an imagined future in mind.  Through it we're able to share our thoughts and feelings as well as hide them.  With linguistic facility, individuals are able to express their own identity, communicating what they think and who they are with greater or lesser confidence.

Growing up in a place where my first forms of expression (I can't say English was a second language) were seen by me as worthless had the effect of undermining any confidence I might have had in communicating what I thought or who I was.  To begin with, this was a problem only in fairly formal situations; for example, when meeting those who weren't immediate friends or family.  To teachers and headteachers, I must have come across as pretty dumb.  My secondary school headmaster, in fact, suggested in June, after five years there, that I might as well leave the following month as I really didn't do myself or the school proud.  After I left in July and the exam results came through, I found that I had passed them all.  But by then, my own sense of self was hidden, even from me, under a blanket of shyness and embarrassment in social situations.  And this, all because living in the no-man's land between two language registers, because, by the time I was a teenager, I felt uncomfortable using both my home dialect and that more standard version of school.

It was as if teachers had arrived as kindly missionaries with the aim of rescuing us from the dark practices of saying things like: Dinny tich that cause its mines and ah'll gee yi a skelp roond the lug.  Whut's the mitter?  Ah thocht yi wir m pal.

I haven't got to grammar and creativity yet; so there is more.

How does a Scot come to write books on English grammar?

Nobody has asked that question yet, but I'll be ready when they do.  The simple answer has to do with the value the Scots have traditionally placed on education and the democratic escape-route it provided from the harshness of life; in my case, the work of a mining community chipping out the black stuff underneath the grey waters of the Firth of Forth.  Perhaps associated with that is the no-frills, spare rationality of thought associated with Presbyterianism.  Rules are meant to be followed.  Then there is my academic background: the no-nonsense rigours of Kirkcaldy High School, where you were expected to knuckle down and learn given truths rather than develop questioning skills: grammar over creativity.

There are also more personal reasons for my interest in language, how users select and put chunks of it together, and, as importantly, how it is an expression of who you are and how you are valued in society.

I don't know how it happened, but from a very early age, I learnt to feel ashamed of how I spoke.  I should put it more strongly.  I was taught to feel ashamed of how I spoke.  Part of that feeling came with the territory.  Something to do with poverty.  There were the physical aspect of life.  The unfurnished bedroom, the scruffy, collapsing armchairs, the fraying, hand-me-down clothes meant home life couldn't be a sanctuary. The opposite was the case.  I was happier out in the street with childhood friends where those things didn't matter.  But there was something more insidious that affected lots of us where I lived.  School.  It was there in a primary school, staffed with kindly teachers, that I learnt that the remnants of my local dialect - the words that peppered a more standard English and passed on from my parents' generation - were in some way wrong.  The teachers didn't do this deliberately or knowingly.  They simply used a 'better' form of English.

This might not sound like a big deal, but it had two consequences.  One, it was easier and preferable not to speak at all, rather than expose myself to ridicule I imagined would happen.  And, two, I felt embarrassed to be part of my community, to have the parents I had, and to be me.