Grammar-to-go

By Heidi Alida

This year me and my group had our practice period in a class with 6. Graders. We chose to do the grammar-to-go method the day we had our teacher from the University visiting. Since we did this, it was also very important for all of us in the group to both take part in the planning of the teaching scheme but also in the learning activity in the classroom. We had 90 minutes available, and we built the teaching session up as three parts, where every part had a focus area from the grammar-to-go method. As we were three students in the group, we decided to conduct the plan where one of us were in charge for each part.

The first part, is the first task in the method, the speaking, writing, spelling. We started with the introduction to the poem. The poem we decided to use were Brother by Mary Ann Hoberman (Pashen, 2005). The pupils received a thorough and interesting introduction to the poem where they did choral reading before they discussed the poems content and form. The pupils got divided into four groups, where every group copied one stanza, and then got together to practice on how to perform it, with focus on intonation, tempo, pitch and empathy.

In the second part of the class we were going to focus on point six in the grammar-to-go method. The pupils were going to work with grammar, but we didn’t introduce it for them as grammar. We made a document with the poem, where we hade the poem on the left side, that the pupils used in the first part of the class. We had a picture in the middle, to illustrate the poem, and on the right side we hade the poem again, but here we had taken away the subject pronoun and the possessive determiner. This way the pupils could focus on filling in another pronoun and possessive determiner than the ones in the original poem. The student responsible for this part had a thorough review of the task with the pupils, repeating all the pronouns together with the pupils before they started to fill in.

The last part was the one I was responsible for. Here we chose point five, writing own poems, finding rhyming words from grammar-to-go. The pupils had recently been working with both five-line poems and adjectives in the Norwegian classes. The pupils were very grateful for English, and seemed to like the classes very well, but the academic level was very varying. By choosing a five-line poem for everyone to write, most of the pupils would be able to make one and experience success. I began with letting the pupils tell what they remembered about five-line poems, and they remembered all the different lines, and what they sustained. I still chose to show some examples from Stairs homepage (Cappelen Damm). I also let the recipe on a five-line poem be in sight for those of the students who needed a reminder during the task.

I think the grammar-to-go method was interesting to use, but while we were planning the class, I thought it could be hard getting several points into one class. We did make it this time, but during the class we noticed that the first part demanded more time than we had planed. And since we had our teacher visiting we all wanted to do our part. That may have made the last parts a bit stressful. Since the pupils knew the recipe for a five-line poem we were able to finish the task. Had it been another situation I would have saved the last part for later, and instead used time on evaluating the class. We didn’t have time for that, but we brought it with us, and in the English class the week later, we started the class with evaluating the last one with the pupils. The pupils seemed to like it very well and the response was very positive. We also got time for some of the pupils to finish their five-liner and read it for their learning partner or the class. It seemed like the pupils liked the method and the way we worked, and for later I would like to try the grammar-to-go method again, but over a longer time period.



References:

Paschen, E. (red.). (2005) Poetry Speaks to Children. Naperville, Illinoise: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cappelen DAMM, Stairs http://stairsonline5.cappelendamm.no/sjangerside.html?tid=951154 Sourced: 20.10.2015, kl:13:52.