English Figurative Language Crossed the Road

Recently, I came across this wonderful article pictured below:

Unfortunately, I've lost the source (if found, this will be updated).

We shared it with our Year Six children...

We shared it as part of our current poetry work. We asked the children to write sentences in the style of 'Why did the chicken cross the road?", but replace the chicken with a poetic device and then make the rest of the sentence an example of that figurative language. Here's some of what they came up with...

The children found this an engaging and productive activity.

Edit Your Friend's Facebook Posts

Some of my friends on Facebook and contacts on Twitter write beautifully and accurately, others (like me) have the off (:-)) typo here and there, while others just write with errors all over the place (your/you're - grrr).

This is a post by a friend of mine on his Facebook page. I took a screen capture and asked my class to correct it. We did it as an Exit Ticket activity.

So, spot an awful social media update, copy it, anonymise it, and give it to your class... 

Minecraft and Grammar

We love to play Minecraft, kids love to play Minecraft (many, not all). Therefore, when possible, and without over-doing it, we use the game to provide a context to some of our lessons.
Recently, we have been giving our children some work on the different elements of sentences and have been focussing on the difference between verbs, subjects and objects. This is important knowledge for helping them to understand how their own sentences are structured as well as for when we work on the differences between the active and passive voice.
To help the children understand the difference we put on a quick game of Minecraft and started mining.

 The children were able to understand the difference between the subject (Steve) and the object (the blocks being mined) as well as the verb.
To reinforce this, we were able to change the 'skin' of the character as well as the view of the camera. This meant that the children could see the subject from different viewpoints (changing the skin changes the look of the main character). By changing the equipment that the character was carrying we were able to change the verb as well.

Just writing this has given me the idea to look at using Minecraft to reinforce writing in the first and third person. Look back soon for how that goes...

Taskmaster: Prepositional Phrases

A third addition to our ideas for the classroom that have come from the television program 'Taskmaster'. 

This time, linked to English, and grammar in particular. Watch the video below:

The task set was along the lines of, "Place the gym balls on the yoga mat that's on top of the hill. While most contestants carried the balls up the hill to the mat, Richard Osman went up, brought the mat down and then place the balls onto it: balls on the mat that (was) on top of this hill. Room for interpretation in the prepositional phrase? Greg Davies thought so. 

Can you set you children a similar task and look for scope within the prepositional phrases involved to carry out the task in 'their own way'?

Lynne Truss' Books for Punctuation

I can remember when 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' was first published. I was at university at the time and a house mate purchased it as a gift for his mother. I had a flick through and found some of the contents of interest. A few years later, and now teaching, I came across the 'child version' of the book. So, I made a purchase and often us the three child-friendly versions of the original in class. Although aimed at children, these books often act as an aide-mémoire for me too!

We've recently been looking at how commas can change the meaning of a sentence. 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves For Children: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference' is ideal for introducing this. After looking at the examples in the book and some of what's in the other two books pictured above, we had a go at writing some of our own:

Click here to see some more of our examples.

More Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences.

We are now trying the next step in our use of dice to support children in their use of Alan Peat 'Exciting Sentences'.

With the Year Six class we work with, we are giving the children, who have all been taught different sentence types over the last three years, a blank cube net as might be found here. The children, who are writing mystery narratives, are going to choose the most relevant and useful sentence types for their piece of writing, The challenge will be to take two dice and merge the two different sentence types into one wonderful sentence of complexity and detail (instead of appsmashing; sentencesmashing).

Whilst we love the way 'exciting sentences' serves as a toolbox for equipping children with different ways of adding sentence structures and punctuation, the ultimate aim is for children to develop a proper understanding of how those sentence structures and different pieces of punctuation work. Then we want them to effectively and appropriately 'break the rules' in order to make their writing more effective.

The purpose of this intermediate stage is to get the children to take a proactive role in choosing which sentence types work best for the text type they are writing and, more importantly, how they go beyond their basic use in making them more effective. For those writers who are confident, we now want to teach them to take risks with their writing and start deliberately breaking rules, from a basis of knowledge, in order to engage the reader.

The children found that some sentences worked more effectively than others. For example an 'if, if, if, then' sentence worked well with 'simile' sentences. It made them think even harder about the effect the words were having on the reader especially when the sentences went wrong. It also demonstrated those children who were learning the sentence types parrot fashion and needed some grammar and punctuation intervention as well as those who had a deeper understanding.

To get started with the 'exciting sentence' types, buy the book here.

Your Own Bank of GPS (SPaG) Resources

With a bit of inspiration from Stephen Lockyer, we've set off on a new venture. After reading this post by him, we wanted to find a website, Pinterest board or similar that had photographs with grammar errors on that could be used with Key Stage Two children. The reason we wanted a website with 'friendly' images on was so that it could be a go-to place either while planning or if something came up in a lesson. Everything there could be trusted to be classroom material. A web image search is often great, but can involve a lot of scrolling and sometimes things that shouldn't be shown in a classroom.

Because we often find it difficult to switch off from 'teacher mode', while out-and-about, we sometimes spot that companies have made errors on their signs (or intentionally made broken grammar rules as part of their branding). We have started to take photos of these and store them on Dropbox so that we (and others) can make use of them.

Here's one from a hospital toilet:

And one Tweeted to the council responsible for it:

So @bedfordtweets changed name of car park & covered up 'free parking'. Now how about sorting that apostrophe? http://t.co/R6iYtkxy63

— Liam (@ThisIsLiamM) March 16, 2014

After discussing the errors or branding, a company or person could be written to by a class or pupil to explain what's wrong. And, as the photo was taken by the teacher, we're able to explain its location and context. It may even be in a location familiar to the children.

Our images can be found here. Please feel free to use them.