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Teaching Grammar the “Write” Way

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Teaching Grammar

Do your children dread the part of the day devoted to writing and grammar? Maybe they have trouble seeing the correlation between grammar and good writing, or maybe they view grammar as boring, impractical, and repetitive. Before college, I felt the same way. So how did I end up with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English? It all started with a different approach to the subject.

English was my least favorite subject in high school. It was hour after hour of workbooks, rules, and more exceptions than rules. Once I turned in a short story that I had spent hours writing and was disappointed in my grade, not because it wasn’t higher but because it was based solely on the fact that I hadn’t made many spelling errors. In contrast to the drudgery of English, math class was exciting, fun, and challenging.

I left for college excited about being a math major. Reluctantly, I also signed up for the first of three required college English classes. In that class, I began learning some new things. I found out that I could arrange paragraphs in a way that made my argument more convincing. I realized that I could replace linking verbs with action verbs to give my essay strength and vitality. I caught on that writing poetry was more than just finding words that rhymed. My papers were graded on content as well as spelling. I started to love English, and I discovered that I was actually more competent in that area than in mathematics.

Maybe your children share my pre-college feelings about writing and grammar. But the good news is that by using two helpful teaching methods, induction and integration, you can interest your children in English and improve their long-term comprehension of grammar.

Induction

Deduction starts with a general rule, from which you make specific applications. For example, you can give your child a list of auxiliaries (helping verbs) and tell him that be, have, and do can also be used as main verbs; then he can underline all the auxiliaries in an exercise.

Induction, on the other hand, is examining specifics and then creating a general rule. To teach inductively, you would give your child several sample sentences with verbs and auxiliaries and then let him generate his own list of auxiliaries. Using this list, he would determine which auxiliaries could also be used as main verbs. Induction allows children the opportunity to investigate or discover something themselves, stimulating their curiosity and their eagerness to learn more.

Integration

To give the facts of grammar a real-life context, integrate your grammar lessons with writing, vocabulary, literature, and speech. Your child could compose a piece of writing and then revise it, changing the passive-voice verbs to active voice and noting the difference in tone. Ask your child to explain why some sentences should remain passive and why others sound better in active voice.

Maybe your child does not like grammar, or maybe he learns quickly and becomes bored. With inductive activities and creative writing assignments, you can spark interest and improve long-term comprehension. Remember that language is a gift from God, unique to beings created in His image, so it’s important to understand it and use it well. Using a fresh approach to grammar might even reveal some hidden talents. Who knows? Your reluctant grammar student could turn out to be an English major or a writer someday.

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Written by Dana G.

3 Tips for Being Research Paper Ready

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The research paper is the most difficult part of any English course—almost universally dreaded because of its difficulty. Most students would rather avoid it. As much as students dislike doing the research paper, teaching and grading it is just as intimidating. While I was working on my MA in English, I was also a graduate assistant in the English department, and teaching and grading research papers became my life for the better part of two years. Even with my background in English, I had some of the same fears you probably have as you teach your child about research papers. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to answer my students’ questions or that I’d teach them wrong. Here are three helpful things I learned from teaching college freshmen about writing research papers.

Research-Papers

1. Assign More Than One Paper

I always handed out questionnaires on the first day of class to ask my students what kind of writing they had already done. I liked the interesting responses to that question. Some regularly wrote on a blog while others had written short stories. Almost invariably, the students who had written research papers regularly in high school (once a year or more) did better on their first college-level research paper than those who hadn’t.

You can encourage your child to develop his thinking by assigning different kinds of research papers, and not just for English class. You can assign comparison-contrast papers in history, persuasive papers in economics, argumentative papers in biology, analytical papers in literature, or simple informative papers in science.

2. Let Them Write About What They Like

Because of English department requirements, every student in my class had to write about energy technology and policy, a topic even I found boring. It was hard to watch students who were beginners at writing struggle with both a lack of understanding about writing as well as a strong dislike for the subject. If it’s your child’s first research paper, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have some fun with it.

Letting your children pick their own topics or assigning them a topic they’re interested in can be a great way to encourage them to write, especially if they’re reluctant or young writers. Though writers also need to know how to write well about topics they aren’t interested in, it’s better and more encouraging for them if their first experience with a high school assignment is on a topic they enjoy.

3. Require Them to Make a Good Outline

An outline can make or break a research paper. If the writer has a solid outline, he’ll have a solid paper. But if his outline is faulty, the paper won’t work. With fifty or more students, I couldn’t make sure every student had a good outline before I let them start writing the paper, but in a homeschool situation you can.

An outline is like a snapshot of the entire paper. It should quickly show the reader the overall structure of the paper—the argument, the reasons for that argument, and the support for those reasons. For most papers, the main points should all explain why the thesis is true. The subpoints all explain how the corresponding main point is true. If the outline includes sub-subpoints, these should show research that supports the how’s of the subpoints. If the main points and subpoints follow these guidelines, then the thought behind the paper should be accurate, and your child can focus on style and grammar as he presents the content. If the outline doesn’t follow these guidelines, then he isn’t ready to write yet. So make sure your child has the outlining done properly before writing the rest of the paper.

BJU Press’s Writing & Grammar courses put a strong emphasis on research paper writing and suggest many options for research papers in different subject areas.

Do you have any other research paper writing topics you’d like me to cover or tips you’d like to share? Feel free to comment with your questions or suggestions!

Fresh Notebooks and a Fresh Start

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Freshly sharpened pencils and new blank notebooks—that was what I always loved best about getting ready for the first day of school. Oh, sure, there were the textbooks too, but what could compare to the possibilities of little volumes full of blank pages? Knowing my notebooks would soon hold the requisite math problems and spelling words did little to dampen my enthusiasm. After all, they might also harbor fantastic stories, random thoughts, and an occasional doodle in the margin. The possibilities for those new notebooks were endless. What a relief to throw away the worn-out, used-up notebooks of last year and begin again!

Years have passed, and while my enthusiasm for the potential in blank notebooks reignites when I see school supplies go on sale, a feeling of responsibility accompanies it. Now I’m not writing just in notebooks but on human lives. How can I possibly impart even half of what my children need to know to face life in this increasingly difficult world? Spelling and grammar, history, math, science, biblical studies, humanities—the list goes on, and that’s just their school subjects! Life skills, walking with God, common sense, responsibility, and a good work ethic rarely receive written grades but are far more significant to their future success as adults.

Who can face the awesomeness of such a task? And yet, even with such a weighty responsibility, getting “back to school” is exciting! Each child seems like a “notebook” full of fresh, blank paper on which to write the learning of a new school year. And each day is a new page, right?

Fresh Notebooks

But these “notebooks” are much less pristine than we might wish. Despite the hope that comes with a new beginning, our fallen human nature reasserts itself quickly, and it isn’t long before torn, dirty pages appear. Even in the more nurturing environments of our homeschools, we have to correct bad attitudes, selfishness, laziness, and sometimes even cheating.

So what are we as parents to do when it becomes apparent that, in spite of all of our best efforts, this new homeschool year isn’t going to go as smoothly as we had hoped? When instead of writing on fresh pages in new notebooks, we’re competing for this year’s writing space with last year’s scribbled misunderstandings, gummed-up pages, and faulty thought equations?

Despite temptations to think otherwise, we must remind ourselves that God is the one at work in these young lives. His is the hand that writes—we are simply His pens. We may have academic and learning goals for our children (and we should), but His purpose for their lives reaches into eternity. While we grow discouraged over torn pages and rewrites, He is re-creating pages to hold the Story He writes on every willing heart.

So if, after a great start to your homeschool year, things begin getting rough and you wonder again whether you’re making any progress in the “notebooks” you’ve been given, look up! The Father’s handwriting can be hard to read sometimes, but He knows exactly which words to include in each little volume and how best to guide His pens. And in the hand of the Master Teacher, that makes all the difference.

Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy

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As parents, you want your children to succeed in every area of their lives, and as home educators, you especially want them to succeed in their education. A good way to visualize your goals for your children’s education is through Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Dr. Benjamin Bloom described what he believed to be the best processes for learning. Though he identified three different domains of learning, we are all most familiar with the cognitive domain, which has to do with knowledge. Understanding his process can help you to fulfill the greater purpose of education—education isn’t just about learning facts and figures. It’s a process that continuously encourages children to grow and think critically. Bloom’s Taxonomy verbalizes the process so that we can aim for a clearer goal in education—being able to master concepts so that we can create new concepts.

 

BloomsTax

Since the best way to learn something is to see it applied, here is Bloom’s process for the cognitive domain applied to learning nouns. (To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the rule that says nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.)

Level One: Knowledge/Remembering

The first level focuses on facts and recall. It has nothing to do with what the rule means, implies, or suggests, it only focuses on knowing what the rule says. Our rule is “Nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.”

Level Two: Comprehension/Understanding

Comprehension is one step beyond simple recall. It demonstrates that you not only know what the rule is word for word, but you also know what those words mean and you can put the rule into your own words to express the same concept. To understand the “noun as a person, place, or thing” rule, you have to know what a person is, what a place is, and so on. Putting the rule into my own words, I might say that people’s names, specific or general locations, and objects are all referred to with nouns.

Level Three: Application/Applying

Level three begins the step where textbook practices and exercises come in. Here we take our rule and look at something it applies to. That means taking a sample sentence and finding and labeling all the nouns, based on our rule.

For example, “Amy (person) wanted to move back to Scotland (place), but her aunt (person) didn’t have enough money (thing) for the move (thing).”

Level Four: Analysis/Analyzing

Analysis involves grouping information into parts. It’s a question-and-answer process that might reveal more about our rule. When I put the rule into my own words, I changed things to objects because I felt that objects better indicates the tangible nature of things. But in the example sentence above, I’ve identified the second move as a noun, not a verb. Why is it a noun and not a verb? When we’re analyzing, we need to recognize that some words may be nouns that refer to persons, places, or things even if they’re normally used as a different part of speech. While we’re thinking about it, we may notice that we can classify the second move as a noun, but not the first one.

Levels Five and Six: Evaluation/Evaluating and Synthesis/Creating

Originally, Bloom’s fifth level was synthesis, and his sixth was evaluation. But a group of Bloom’s former students revised his original process in the 1990s. Under the revised version, evaluating became the fifth level, and creating became the sixth.

Evaluating involves forming conclusions based on new and prior knowledge and being able to support those conclusions with that knowledge. Here we should be able to look at what we discovered in our analysis step and explain why we came to the conclusion that we did. In the example sentence above, we know that move usually indicates an action, like when we first used it, but the second time it’s used in a tangible, countable sense, not as an action.

This step marks the end of most forms of practice exercises in many textbooks. But we need to go on to the last level in order to demonstrate true knowledge of a concept.

The final level in the revised model is creating. Creating requires using all prior knowledge in order to form a new idea. It goes beyond reading a new sentence and identifying parts of speech. Creation demonstrating a mastery of nouns would require putting together a new sentence using nouns intentionally and naturally. For example, in the following sentence, I’ve created a situation to use words that would often act as verbs (love and traveling) as nouns in order to show what we discovered about things.

“Amy decided that her love of traveling was more important to her than her love of Scotland.”

Bloom’s process relies on a widening foundation of knowledge, and BJU Press homeschool curriculum references the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, especially in math and vocabulary. Check out our math curriculum or vocabulary curriculum to see how we do it!

How to Plan for a Writing Project

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It’s that time again. You’re probably starting to do some homeschool planning for next year. The browser history on your phone might be full of pages from your favorite homeschool websites. You might even have notes either typed or handwritten comparing and contrasting the textbooks you might switch to. But deciding what curriculum to use is only one piece of the planning process for next year. There’s also planning the day-to-day schedule, extra activities, chores, household details . . .  You understand.

Planning a writing project may not be quite as involved as planning for the next homeschool year, but in both situations the results are affected by how well we prepare. Just as you use a homeschool planner to organize your day, your child can use graphic organizers to plan his writing project. Let’s take a look at some planning tips and graphic organizers that can help your child succeed with his writing projects.

Planning, the first step in the five-step writing process, helps make writing the first draft easier by creating a clear framework for the entire project. The writer (your child) is able to see the flow of thought he wants to communicate. A good way to start planning is by having him answer these questions.

  • What topic are you writing about?
  • Why are you writing?
  • Whom are you writing for?
  • How are you going to format your writing?

As he answers these questions, have him take time to brainstorm (and possibly research) ideas and information related to his topic. A practical way to group these details together and decide the order to arrange them in is with a graphic organizer. Some graphic organizers work better with different writing projects.

Plot Pyramid

A word web is one type of graphic organizer. It can be used to organize details about a topic, an event, or even a character in a story. After listing out details, your child can number them in the order in which he wants to write about them.

Creating a senses chart is another way your child can plan out a writing project. Just like it sounds, this chart relates to the five senses and is great for helping your child write a description. Have him draw five columns on a blank piece of paper and answer the following questions:

  • How does it look?
  • How does it sound?
  • How does it taste?
  • How does it smell?
  • How does it feel?

Have your child list sensory words in each column to describe the object. This list of words should include terms that help the reader mentally see, hear, taste, smell, or feel what is being read. (Sometimes only a few senses can be used to describe an object.)

A plot pyramid is a graphic organizer that establishes the beginning, middle, and end of a story. (Its counterpart for planning nonfiction writing would be a time-order chart.) Visually showing the arc that takes place in a creative story is important to help children see that the problem (usually a conflict between characters) and the solution are the transition points of their whole story.

You and I both know that taking time to plan brings benefits in multiple areas of life. Teaching your child to be a good, clear communicator for the glory of God begins with the planning stage.

Find more graphic organizers and writing resources in the BJU Press elementary English curriculum.