Why Learn Grammar and Conventions?

What I'm reading

Spring break in the Japanese academic calendar means 3 weeks to learn everything a teacher needs to learn to be ready for the new school year in April. For this teacher, the biggest new thing is (drum roll…) 4th and 5th grade English language arts. I got my head pretty well wrapped around 6th and 7th English language arts this past year, so what’s one step earlier? I got a writing curriculum recommended by a former colleague (from Jamie Sears of the Not So Wimpy Teacher website and podcast—I'm getting a crash course in elementary teaching from all her wonderful resources!). I plan to expand the independent reading that worked well this year in 6th/7th. And reading Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language, Grades 1-5. (I’ve also pre-ordered the middle school version, coming out in a couple more days: March 31!)

Here's what I find exciting: Rather than making grammar about what NOT to do, make it about what TO do. Don't teach grammar and conventions as an interminable list of inscrutable rules not to be transgressed, teach it as a search for the patterns that powerful writing uses. Observe what good writers do, consider why they do it, then practice their patterns—patterns of writing power.

There's even a pattern to the teaching. Author Jeff Anderson calls it a series of invitations, inviting young writers into the mysteries of the discipline: the invitation to notice, to compare and contrast, to imitate, to celebrate and apply, and to edit. These invitations constitute a series of 10-minute mini-lessons at the beginning of each writing class. Here's what they might look like in a first grade class learning about capitalizing names.

Invitation to Notice: Choose a sentence from literature that models one of the patterns and ask students, “What do you notice?” (I love this because it is one of the 8 activities that Making Thinking Visible identifies as the thinking we want to foster: “observing closely and describing what’s there”) For this example, Anderson uses a sentence from Kate DiCamillo’s Mercy Watson to the Rescue: “Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named Mercy.” Students may notice things from three periods in the sentence to the capital letter at the beginning, and you can ride the curiosity wave as long as you end up talking about why writers capitalize the first letters of names.  

Invitation to Compare and Contrast: Make up a sentence to pair with the original one to examine similarities and differences. 

• Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named Mercy.
• Dr. Gonzales has a cat named Aristotle.

Invitation to Imitate: With varying amounts of scaffolding, in pairs, or independently, students imitate the pattern: Mrs. Smith's class has a rabbit named sleepy. I have a goldfish named Fred. 

Invitation to Celebrate and Apply: Sharing what others have done and doing it more. Displaying examples. Finding them in textbooks. Scanning writing notebooks.

Invitation to Edit. After reviewing the mentor sentence, show 3 ways it could be modified and discuss what's different and what's the effect of the change:

• Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named Mercy.
• Mr. watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named Mercy.
• Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a Pig named Mercy.
• Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named MercY.

That’s the quick version. The full version is 446 pages. I’m on page 81, so now I’d better get back to my reading and learning. There’s also a podcast I recommend—15 minutes introducing each of the invitations for middle school.

What are you learning this spring break?

Celebrating Learning

MD Duran on Unsplash

Sometimes you’ll have a sad day but list up happy things that you had that day. Maybe you’ll feel better. And in life it’s a very important thing to feel thankful to people and for the situation. —Middle school student exam reflection based on reading “How to be patient,” Newsela. 

I’m going to follow my middle school student’s advice on the exam I read yesterday. 

I just completed my first school year on the Japanese academic schedule—April to March. I attended graduation this morning, the young women resplendent in kimono. The cherry blossoms are blooming, the windows are open, the drapes billowing in the breeze, and the tractors are being taken out of storage and tuned up for plowing and planting the rice fields. There’s a feeling of completion: as I assessed exams yesterday, students articulated and I could see the learning that had taken place this year. And yet…it IS only spring…and I have to have my new classes ready to go in 3 weeks. It’s been a year with a steep learning curve for me: new grade levels (6 and 7) and new subjects (English as a foreign language). But “happy things” did happen, things that make me thankful for the opportunities I’ve had and the students I’ve been blessed to teach. Here are some of them from the last week:

High school student on exam essay: “I have learned how I should live in a world with contradiction and evil, as a Christian who desires to help children in poverty…. God desires…shalom in these situations. Therefore, even if I struggle, I want to follow Him with having shalom.”

High school student in final speech: “I am thankful that I chose to go to this class because I’ve learned a lot of things about poverty, cultural differences, morality, and many other things and I also learned about the way to live and the way to love people. Teachers are one of the people who educate students about their choices and guide them to make good choices. So please continue to be involved in student choices as it has guided us as well over the past year.”

Middle schooler in note on back of exam: “Thank you for teaching me a lot of English. I mostly don’t like books, but you made me like them! I am already excited for next year English!”

Parent thank you note: “We appreciate your...teaching students essential reading, writing and critical thinking skills; and encouraging book reading throughout the year…. We are impressed to see [our child’s] writing and reading skills have improved drastically…. He finished reading so many books…. Your lessons are also inspiring and help him see things from different perspectives….” 

I think that parent summarized my course more concisely than I did on my syllabus last year! 

So next week I’ll be thinking about how to make the classes I’ll be teaching again even better, and how to begin getting a handle on the new class I’ll be teaching, but for today, it’s enough to celebrate the blessings of what went well in a year full of challenge and strangeness everywhere, but also full of growth and learning.

What good things are you celebrating in your classes this year? 

Making Research Real for Middle School: Choice and Class-World Connection

Researchers in 6th and 7th grade English language arts commented on their process of selecting one refugee from the “Stories” page of the UN Refugee Agency’s web site to report on: 

• I’m interested in these three refugee stories because they’re all doctors or trying to become doctors, and I want to be a doctor.
• I picked this refugee story because it’s the most recent—this is something happening right now!
• I picked this refugee story because she helped make a cookbook, and I like to cook.

Note to self: always plan end-of-year projects that involve student choice and connect what has been studied to the real world. I was really feeling some end-of-the-year blahs, counting down the days to the last day of school March 19 (I’m on a Japanese academic calendar), anxious just to be done with this year. Then this refugee story mini-project happened.

I introduced the project last week as we wrapped up our study of A Long Walk to Water. I said, “We’ve learned a lot about one group of refugees, the Lost Boys of Sudan, in one country in the 1980s. Do you know about any other refugees in any place or time?” 

One World War 2 enthusiast volunteered, “There were a lot of refugees in Europe in 1945.” Yes. We discussed that for a bit. Anything else? Another student knew about detention camps for the Uighur people in China—an important and related human rights issue. After that, crickets. 

I realized that living in an island nation that accepts an extremely limited number of refugees, my students, as opposed to students in the US, probably don’t personally know any refugees. This, then, in a world with over 26 million refugees in mid-2020, is an important project! 

When I introduced them to the “Stories” page of the UN Refugee Agency’s web site students were hooked. They spent the rest of the class period browsing, picking 3 they found interesting, discussing choices with a partner, and finally settling on one.  The next day they went back to the website to take notes on their chosen article, and they were shocked to find a new article! This drove home the point that these are things that are happening right now. The third day they came up with a background question on their refugee to find an additional resource on—country, culture, problem they were fleeing, a challenge they’d faced, a solution or help they’d received. Then students had 2 days to synthesize the information in a poster.

Learning questions and conversations along the way:

• Hey, there’s an article on the UNHCR web page that wasn’t there yesterday? (Yes, these stories are happening right now.)
• What’s a displaced person? (Discussion of the difference among cross-border refugees, internally displaced people, and stateless people, all of whom the UNHCR has responsibility for)
• You mean there was more than one civil war in Africa? (Introductory conversation about the legacy of colonialism.)

Yesterday I shared with them the graphic novel about a refugee from Somalia I was in the middle of reading, When Stars Are Scattered. It was the end of the period when students had all submitted their posters and were doing independent reading. I said, “I hope to finish this over the weekend and make it available to anyone who wants to read it on Monday.” I had 2 takers on the way out of class. I finished it last night, and it is excellent. I’ll also have The Red Pencil (novel in verse, Darfur, Sudan), Inside Out and Back Again (novel in verse, Vietnam), Nowhere Boy (prose, Syria), and Refugee (prose, Germany, Cuba, and Syria) available for check out over spring break. While there might be a current struggle between schools of thought pushing reading skills and pushing background knowledge, there’s also a sweet spot where a certain amount of background knowledge opens up a world of reading that just deepens that knowledge. 

On the day I introduced the project and the expectations, including closing with a memorable line, I asked, “What might be something really important about this project, something I want you to learn and something you’d want the people who see yours to walk away with?” A student who I might have ranked as one of the least likely to be paying attention at any given moment offered, “Empathy!”

My work is done. It was a new and strange year and difficult year. This week marked the one-year declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization. A year ago today, I was getting ready to return to Japan—a new school, a new job, new grade levels, and new subjects. It was a year of learning—not only by me, but also by my students. And I am thankful. Thankful for this time. This place. This work. These students. This opportunity to learn and to teach. 

Arigatou.

The Learning Power of a Game (pt. 2)

Eighth grade English as a foreign language (EFL) students walked out of class on a Friday afternoon repeating passive-voice sentences and giggling: 

• Mirrors were NOT invented by nine million people every day.
• 70% of the earth is NOT covered by the Egyptians.
• Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is NOT taken up by a 14-year-old Roman emperor.

In my debut year of teaching EFL, I’ve learned and relearned that games can be hugely motivating. As energy and engagement rise, so does learning. The problem is not all language games are created equal—in how engaging the students find them, or in the value of the learning that happens relative to the time invested. I wasn’t sure how this one would rate in either category, but we needed a game and we needed to introduce passive voice verbs. So I found this game on the TeachThis web site. (Unfortunately, it isn’t one of their free ones, but I found their free offerings enticing enough to plunk down for an annual membership, and it has been utterly worth it. I am not being paid to say this!)

Here’s how this game goes: There’s a table of passive voice sentences with most of the sentence (through the verb) on the left and an in or by phrase on the right. I printed it, cut everything apart, and scrambled everything. The first step is to look at the grammar. We classified the pieces as front half or back half and asked, “What do you notice?” (Front half: Starts with a capital letter, ends with a verb. Back half: Ends with a period, starts with in or by.) 

Next, we had to match the sentence halves all up—introducing the facts, using logic, and learning vocabulary. (Got some global competence here, too! When I asked students at the end of class what they’d learned they offered “Pasta and ice cream were first made in China” and “742 languages are spoken in Indonesia.”) Though some of the facts students already knew. (“The Tokyo subway is used—by nine million people every day.”) 

Some of the matching we could do by logic. One of the first tries was “70% of the earth is covered—by rainforest.” After I told the group they were on the right track with sentence structure, but they needed to actually visualize the sentence meaning, they realized it was “70% of the earth is covered—by water” and “14% of the Earth’s surface is covered—by rainforest.” 

But logic presupposes comprehension, so I overheard a whispered discussion in Japanese clarifying the meaning of “oil” in “Each day over 10 million barrels of oil are produced—in Saudi Arabia.”  Not “cooking oil” but what gasoline and kerosene come from. A game boosts language students’ intrinsic motivation for understanding vocabulary. 

There were also a lot of sentences I had to just give away, because none of us had any idea. (“The pencil was invented—by Conrad Gessner in Switzerland.”) But that's okay because by that time, students' curiosity was piqued and they really wanted to know! 

Then came the memory game. We turned the strips upside down in 2 columns—front half and back half—and took turns trying to turn over matching pairs. Here’s the grammar kicker—you always have to read the sentence you turn over, and if it isn’t correct, you have to make it negative, like this: “Toothpaste was NOT invented—by water.” Yes, it could get pretty nonsensical, but it elicited giggles, and humor positively correlates with learning! (One of the true sentences targeted this directly: “The Whoopee cushion was invented—by a 14-year-old Roman Emperor.”)

I had said we’d play the memory game for 10 minutes, not knowing how well it would go over. When the timer went off, students asked if we could keep playing. Why not? The next thing in my lesson plan was a worksheet on passive voice, but the learning was already happening. 

By the end of the class, in addition to an assortment of interesting global facts and the pattern of passive voice verbs, we’d also learned that one of the class members has an amazing spacial memory. She ended with 3 times as many pairs as the next person!

So, what makes a language learning game good? I still don’t know 100%, but I know that these factors contributed to yesterday’s success of the passive voice matching memory game:

• The intrinsic motivation of competition

• Strong patterning

• A good dash of humor 

Anything that results with students walking out of a Friday afternoon language class giggling and repeating the studied grammar pattern is worth figuring out how to repeat, so I want to keep experimenting!

What kinds of games have worked well for you, where do you find them, and why do you think they work?