Adventures on Sentence Street
Time to Change our Grammar Teaching
Links with Times articles on grammar teaching and learning by young primary school children by Education Correspondent, Nicola Woolcock: ‘Don’t know what fronted adverbials are? Ask a 7 year old’. Dated 3rd May 2016
The National Curriculum requires children as young as 7 to understand grammar terms denoting word classes (nouns, adjectives, adverbs) as well as singular, suffix, compound. Older primary school pupils must identify and discriminate between phrase and clause types; verb tenses (progressive vs. perfect; active and passive forms); ellipsis and anonyms. This necessitates parents at the very least understanding what the various terms mean e.g. what’s the difference between an adjective and an adverb, a prepositional phrase and a possessive pronoun.
Most of the parents I work with admit to being bamboozled. Most teachers I work do not possess a degree in linguistics and may not therefore understand the complex and ever-changing relationships between components that structure sentences themselves. But most parents and teachers can tell a mean story.
This was my motivation for creating ‘Adventures on Sentence Street’, a story about a town called Grammar Grange and a road called Sentence Street, where an array of characters live together, as neighbours and families, at times having different roles depending on their place.
‘Adventures on Sentence Street’ eschews random rules and links grammar in a mystery story. The story works by logically linking concepts together that children can understand, reinforcing concepts with an overarching mindmap of the scene, enhanced by characters and pictures, rhymes, raps and chants. Using memory-enhancing techniques, information is categorised together and added to in ‘chunks’, developing automatic links and making it easier for children to remember and retrieve it when it’s needed.
There is a town called Grammar Grange and Grammar Grange is very…(ellipsis alert) strange.
Who said grammar can’t be meaningful and … (ellipsis alert again) fun??