Grammar in the Wild

We had a wild time with sentences in 6th and 7th grade English Language Arts this week!

Grammar’s natural environment is print and speech. It runs around freely on pages, pen-tips, tongues, ears, and eyes, clothed in stories. So, equipped with ideas from this summer’s re-reading of Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson, I set out with my students this week to study some grammar in the wild—in its context of reading and writing. Students were smiling and laughing, engaged beyond my wildest dreams. I’m so excited to see where this trip will take us, because new learning jumps out at me even as I guide my students.

We started a class study of the novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio with the start of school this week. (I wrote about the unit plan in last week’s blog post.) After introducing the unit and reading the first page the first day, on the second day, I followed Anderson’s script almost to the letter, substituting sentences from the first page of Wonder for his sample sentences from other novels.

I asked the students to write a sentence in their notebooks. Any sentence. On any topic. Just write a sentence. I took a couple samples from volunteers and wrote them on the whiteboard:

• I like to read books.
• White horses are rare and beautiful.
• I eat dirt.

(I’ll bet you can picture the student in your class who would have volunteered each of those sentences!) Next I asked if they were really sentences. I got hesitant nods. “How do you know?” “They have periods!” a brave soul offered. Well, yes, as the teacher/transcriber, I did put periods at the end. But then we open our books to the first page that we had read the day before. There’s a word with a period after it: “Inside.” I ask if that’s a sentence. Students are pretty sure it isn’t. I direct them back to the whiteboard and ask them what makes those groups of words sentences. 

“They tell you something.” 

“‘Inside’ tells me something. How is what they tell me different from that?” I thought this Socratic discussion might get corny, but it didn’t—those 6th and 7th graders were really trying to articulate how they knew those were sentences! After a few back and forths, someone triumphantly dug up the word “subject,” which we decided was the who or what the sentence was about. They didn’t know or remember “verb” or “predicate,” but they identified that the who/what was doing something. I added, “or being.” So we underlined the who/what subject and put a starburst around the doing/being verb in each sentence. There we have the sentence core: 2 words. 

We identified the core of a string of simple sentences on the first page: “I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an XBox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary.” I find a tricky one down the page: “I’m not that way.” Because of the preponderance of “I” subjects so far, everyone gets that, but then they think “not” is the verb. One quiet student catches the trick—he raises his hand and offers, “am.” 

We go back to “And I feel ordinary. Inside.” We see the sentence core is “I feel” and the one-word sentence after it really could be part of that sentence: “I feel ordinary inside.” That’s a very standard, understandable sentence. But what meaning gets added when the writer puts the pause of a period before the last word? It makes us stop, pay attention, and wonder—so what’s up with the outside? It creates a little mystery, and primes us for what comes next. So, I review, 2 words is the most basic sentence. As we continue to read, we’re going to hunt for and collect 2-word sentences. 

A student’s hand shoots up, and I call on her. “I guess,” she says. I stare at her blankly. She holds up her book and points to a place on the first page. “‘I guess.’ It’s a 2-word sentence.” Oh, yes! I knew that! I just had decided not to take that step in this lesson today because it was getting on in the period and we need to get on to reading some more. 

The next day I told them there was 1 kind of 2-word sentence we weren’t going to collect because there were too many of them: dialogue tags. We reviewed dialogue tags from last term, and found a few on the first page of today’s reading. A student noticed as I wrote them on the board that sometimes the subject and verb were reversed. I told them I was noticing another pattern, too.  Look for places where the sentence continues after the dialogue tag. They noticed the comma followed by an -ing verb and sometimes more:

• …he said, standing in front of the half-opened door. (24)
• ...answered Julian, closing the door. (24)
• ...Julian said, walking after me. (25)
• ...Charlotte said, sounding a little bit like Via. (25)
• ...said Julian, shrugging. (25)
• ...I said, trying to keep my voice steady. (25)
• ...explained Charlotte, ignoring Julian’s smirk. (25)

I said, "I’m going to say something and then do something, and I want you to write it down. Use this pattern: the words said, the dialogue tag, then a comma and -ing verb phrase." I acted out the following:

• “This is heavy,” said Mrs. Essenburg, dropping her bag on the floor.
• “It’s cold in here,” said Mrs. Essenburg, opening the window.

Woo-hoo! We know about 2-word sentence cores, we have a sophisticated pattern for combining sentences, and we are getting primed to read like writers!

Who knew grammar could be this much fun or this practical? Monday we’re going to have a 2-Word Slap-Down contest (you’ll have to see Mechanically Inclined if you want all the details), identifying the subject and verb in some of the longer sentences we read…I can hardly wait!