The Grammar of Swooping Swallows

Photo by Jennefer Zacarias on Unsplash

Sometimes life sabotages the best-laid lesson plans. Sometimes it’s birds. And sometimes the interruption feeds back into the lesson and takes you good places you hadn’t even planned for.

The interruption was a pair of birds that had found its way into the hallway outside the room where I was teaching 4th and 5th grade language arts. I was just introducing the focus quote for this week’s work with sentence structure: “Dragonflies swoop” from Swamp Chomp by Lola M. Schaeffer. 

I asked students, “What do you notice?” Here are some of the observations they offered:

• Swoop is present tense. (Excellent connection to last week’s focus on verb tense!)
• Dragonflies is plural.
• Dragonflies is a compound word.
• It makes a really clear picture: what kind of bug and how it was moving.
• It’s a sentence. 

Ah ha! The other noticings are all excellent reader-writerly impulses, but this brings us to the focus for this week, and I ask the key question: “Is it? How do you know?” We actually had a bit of a discussion on this topic. A couple of students thought it was pretty sparse on information, but eventually a couple came up with the terms subject and verb—who or what does or is something, and what are they or what do they do?  

That’s when I spotted the birds in the hallway out of the corner of my eye. My first thought was, “Don’t say anything—the lesson will never get back on track.” My next thought was, “But no one else has noticed! Somebody needs to get those poor birds back outside as soon as possible.” So I mentioned the birds. Chaos erupted as every student in the room seemed to instantaneously teleport from their seats to the doorway. 

A moment later the principal appeared to chase the birds out, and I wondered if the class period were redeemable. That's when a student piped up, "They were swooping!" 

I said, "Yes, they were! And does anyone know what specific kind of bird they were? Like dragonflies are a specific kind of insect?" 

"Swallows!" 

"Swallows swoop!" Wasn't THAT fun to chant a couple of times! We got to explore not only the structure of a sentence, but also the sound of language and the power of specific nouns. All because a couple of birds flew into our grammar lesson. 

I’m really intrigued by the possibilities of this approach to grammar (with or without added swallows) using Jeff Anderson’s Patterns of Power curriculum (see this blog post for my initial overview). Last week was my first foray into it with 4th/5th grade (see this blog post). This week, we keep up the investigation of the choices writers make and the effect those choices have—grammar at the intersection of reading and writing. 

Oh, and my middle school version just arrived this week. I’m looking forward to beginning to implement it in grades 6 and 7 as well. 

How do you help yourself and your students pay attention to the choices writers make and their significance?