I needed to teach a middle school student how to expand his noun-verb-predicate written sentences and found myself falling in love with grammar. Children in grade one are expected to be familiar with a variety of sentence types. (Durden, 160) How did they get this far so quickly?
To teach grammar, I began with Help Your Kids with Language Arts by Doring Kindersley Limited as the reference. Then, I purchased skill practice books and practiced rusty skills along with my student. He struggled; consequently, I happened upon the power of diagramming sentences. I borrowed Sister Bernadette's Dog Barking by Kitty Burns Florey from the library and purchased Sentence Diagramming Level 1 . My student enjoyed this systematic visual mapping of grammar and so did I. And my own writing improved!
Like anything else, one must learn the craft before breaking free of standards to become an artist. And so, I appreciated "Creating Classrooms that Build Strong Sentence Muscles for Primary Writers" (Retrieved 4/23/21), a presentation within The Educator Collaborative, LLC. We need to study grammar--then we can break the rules and reveal voice. A lovely example of this is Jacqueline Woodson's book Coming On Home Soon. Her prose is composed of a blend of complete sentences and sentence fragments. It is eloquent. My Picture Book Talk lesson for this book is here and Study English lesson here.
