Grammar Splatting!

We love delivering training because it gives us the opportunity to work with some really inspirational teachers and the group we worked with on Tuesday 3rd July, was no exception. We arrived in Southwark early in the morning, ready for our “Confidently Teaching Grammar” training! Armed with multiple copies of picture books, a huge pack of post-it notes and a larger-than-average ball of blu-tac, we were ready to go.

Soon, teachers started arriving. Some tentatively popping their heads round the door to see if the room covered in brightly-coloured sugar paper, sentence strips and full of books actually published this century could, in fact, be the room for “grammar training”! Soon the smile reappeared on their faces as they realised they weren’t in for a day of cloze procedures, photocopied worksheets and text-books older than them.

During the day we explored teaching sequences for two texts, focusing on key grammar skills and the need to ensure grammar is embedded throughout the teaching sequence for writing. We began by sharing our ‘Grammar Splat’ activity, using Grahame Baker-Smith’s Leon and the Place Between. Teachers looked for different word classes in the text and explored the possibilities for the activity’s use in the Photo of a Grammar Splat classroom. We then used combinations of different word classes to play “Collecting Nouns” – a collaborative game where one person finds a range of abstract nouns linked to human emotions (excitement, anxiety, hope etc) and the other finds concrete nouns (e.g. stage, curtain etc). Joining pairs of nouns together, teachers created noun phrases from Leon and the Place Between. “A doorway of disappointment” was of particular note, as was “a stage of excitement”. It was great to see teachers buzzing about the ways they were going to apply the activities in their classrooms!

We went on to ‘play with sentences’, both simple and complex, we ‘activated some adverbials’ and looked at ways to build cohesion into Shared writing. The emphasis throughout was very much on making grammar engaging and exciting as well as making teachers feel confident to use key grammatical terms by removing the myth that grammar is difficult. Towards the end of the day, we looked at the sample grammar test for KS2. There was a distinct sense of smugness as teachers, who previously had been less confident with their own grammar skills, realised that the grammar test was not that daunting after all!

Grammar Splat Downloadable Resource