How to Teach Grammar to Primary Students
What would you recommend for teaching grammar and these Anchor Standards for Language to primary students? I get this question quite often. Debbie’s post below is in response to my article, “Why Daily Oral Language (D.O.L.) Doesn’t Work.”
Hi Mark,
I hope you will respond to this via email.
What do you suggest for teaching grammar skills in 1st grade? I am moving from 3rd/4th, where I was lucky enough to read your article years ago and dumped DOL at that time. With success. I am moving to 1st grade next year and am not sure what effective grammar teaching/learning looks like at that level.
Thank you for any feedback. I have a principal who supports getting rid of DOL even though only a few of us have done that. I think he would be happy to see something more effective replace it in primary grades.
Thanks again,
Debbie
Beginning now in kindergarten, the Common Core Language Strand Standards start getting extremely rigorous and very quickly. Middle school and upper elementary teachers are constantly shocked when they discover that what they once introduced as a new Standard at their respective grade levels is now introduced in, say, first grade. For example, check out this first grade Language Standard (1d):
Use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns (e.g., I, me, my; they, them, their; anyone, everything).
Having taught English extensively at both the middle and high school levels (as well as serving as an elementary reading specialist), I will assure you that secondary teachers still “introduce” instruction in these three pronoun usages.
One approach I would recommend is simple sentence diagramming. Learning the functions of the parts of speech in the context of sentence structure by seeing their visual representations and manipulating the word choices and sentence structure makes a lot of sense. Check out “Does Sentence Diagramming Make Sense?” and “How to Teach Sentence Diagramming” to understand the whys and hows of this traditional approach to grammar.
But for those of you thinking that some primary students would not have the fine motor skills to draw traditional sentence diagrams… I would wholeheartedly agree. 
However, if teachers draw or tape the lines, sentence diagramming makes a whole lot of sense. Use blue tape on tables or on individual whiteboards to draw the sentence diagram.
For example, you could use simple fill in the blank sentence diagrams and pre-printed cards to manipulate on the big whiteboard (for the teacher) and on tables or individual whiteboards for students. Use blue tape for the horizontal and vertical lines or printed sheets of paper if kids are advanced enough to write out the words with pencil or dry erase markers.
Check out this instructional approach to learning the functions of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and simple adverbs and how these parts of speech serve as sentence subjects, predicates, objects, and modifiers:
Tom eats.
Tom eats cake.
Tom eats yummy cake.
Tom often eats yummy cake.
Tom ate.
Tom ate cake.
Tom ate yummy cake.
Tom often ate yummy cake.
Tom will eat.
Tom will eat cake.
Tom will eat yummy cake.
Tom often will eat yummy cake.
Lots of word-building possibilities with this instructional approach as well:
She sips.
She sips milk.
She sips her milk.
She sips her cold milk.
She loudly sips her cold milk.
He slurps, drinks (sight word), gulps, chugs, tastes.
Boys, Girls, They (sight word), Men, Women (sight word) slurp, drink (sight word), gulp, chug, taste juice, tea, Coke, smoothies, water (sight word).
Boys, Girls, They (sight word), Men, Women (sight word) slurp, drink (sight word), gulp, chug, taste their juice, tea, Coke, smoothies, water (sight word).
Boys, Girls, They (sight word), Men, Women (sight word) slurp, drink (sight word), gulp, chug, taste their tasty, yucky, big, little (sight word), icy juice, tea, Coke, smoothies, water (sight word).
Boys, Girls, They (sight word), Men, Women (sight word) slurp, drink (sight word), gulp, chug, quietly, happily, sadly, slowly, quickly taste their tasty, yucky, big, little (sight word), icy juice, tea, Coke, smoothies, water (sight word).
This instructional approach is also great for sentence building (think “add on an adjective or adverb”), vocabulary development (think “add on a prefix or suffix”), reading (think outlaw words, vowel sounds, r-controlled, and consonant blends, and spelling (think plurals and inflections). Plus, students are learning all of these skills in the writing context.
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