"The More You Know, The More You See"

If I'm being honest, I still don't know if I am effectively equipped to teach grammar in the most real sense.  At least: I don't feel confident in going into a classroom and incorporating grammar into the lesson in an engaging way.

The book "Engaging Grammar" is helping some.  One recurring theme is the importance of pointing out syntactical and grammar patterns in regular reading.  The idea is, that the more we point out the patterns, the more the students will recognize the patterns themselves, and then be able to incorporate those skills into their own writing.

One seasoned writer wrote about scared he was to approach the concept of grammar.  I think I maybe connected to that feeling right off the bat.  He said that he tried this approach in his classroom--pointing out patterns in existing writing.  He started simply (breaking down a simple subject-verb sentence).  From there, he had the students work to rewrite the sentence in as many ways as they could without taking away from the meaning of the sentence.  Instead of just "Margaret slept" it became "She slept" and "The woman slept" and "I slept" and so on.  The idea was to represent the different forms of the subject and the role of the subject.  That was this teacher's basic lesson.  From there, they began to make the matter more complex.  He said that there were many times when students asked questions to which he knew no answer.  Grammar is a complex thing, after all.  However, he stressed the importance of being honest and pursuing the answer together.

High school students are going to need some grammar practice.  Many of my students will probably be just as initially scared to learn about grammar as I am to teach it.  However, we can make it attainable with the right structure and activities.  We can both build confidence as we go on through the process of learning grammar.  I can't go into the class and open up a lesson on grammar in the way I have heard it as a student: "Today we are going to be learning about grammar because most of the class is making mistake after mistake in this area..."  It might be beneficial to not mention "grammar" at all when introducing the lesson.  We will just be working with words and sentences to make the most strong examples we can.

The most useful thing I'm taking away from my reading on grammar so far is the importance of choosing the right activities to work with the concepts and patterns.  It has been taking me a lot of re-reading to get my mind around grammar (it's never been my strong suit) but I think I am growing in the right direction!