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teaching ideas for SPaG
Wall of shame. Ask students to collect images of grammar / spelling /
punctuation mistakes which have been professionally printed e.g. signs,
company names etc. Display these in your room and invite students to
explain the mistakes.
‘Known’ and ‘new’ information. In sentences, known information often
comes first, and new information often comes towards the end. Cut up a
paragraph for students to put into order. Encourage them to notice that the
information they read at the end of one sentence is usually referred to very
early in the following sentence. Find some examples where this is the
exception to this rule.
Thesaurus against the clock. Write ten common adjectives on the board.
Hold a competition to see who is quickest to find alternative word choices.
You could also try ‘most interesting’ adjective, or try it without the
thesaurus.
Too many –ings. Students can be guilty of using too many –ing words in
their creative writing. Encourage them to read through a piece of their own
writing and replace all –ing words, thus creating a tighter, more controlled
piece of writing.
To be or not to be. Highlight all conjugations of ‘to be’ in a piece of
writing and replace with a stronger, more specific word. No ‘to be’ should
be left.
Add adverbial phrases. Get students to choose an adverbial phrase and
play around with its position in a sentence, and decide which version they
like most and why. What effect does position have on tone or voice?
Speed highlighting. Stick sentences around the room or on the board, then
call out a part of speech or a punctuation point. The first team/person to
identify the feature wins that round. Continue until everything/ as much as
possible has been identified.
Modifier madness. Find a number of amusing dangling modifiers (look
online for examples). Get students to identify the subject of each sentence
and decide whether the modifier is correct or how to change it if it isn’t.
Correction. In pairs, ask students to write a paragraph and include 10 or 20
deliberate mistakes. The next pair should highlight those mistakes. Pass
the highlighted paragraph to the next pair, who make the corrections and
explain what the mistakes are and how they could be improved.
Grammar treasure hunt. Set ten grammar questions and display them
around your school or college. Students run around in teams answering all
the questions before returning to you for a prize. A popular end of term
task!
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teaching ideas for SPaG
Homophone sorting. Print thirty or so sets of common homophones onto
card, and give one set to each student or pair. Students should then put
their homophones into sentences, for peer assessment. Revisit this task
throughout the year, and across the age groups.
Combining. Many ‘combining exercises’ online give students basic sentences
to join together to create more elaborate, intricate pieces of writing. If
everyone works with the same combining ‘kernels’ it’s fascinating to see
how many ways the same phrases or clauses can be put together.
The importance of SPaG. A fun starter is to display sentences in which
changing the punctuation changes the meaning e.g. ‘Woman without her
man is nothing’ (Woman: without her, man is nothing). Students may enjoy
finding their own examples.
SPaG presentations. Teach grammar as part of speaking and listening
presentations. Divide students into differentiated groups and assign them
the job of teaching and testing the rest of the class on a grammar / spelling
/ punctuation rule.
Build a sentence. Working in groups, ask students to write all of the parts
of grammar / word classes they know on to individual cards. Pass the pack
of cards to the next group. Each group should write a subject and verb, and
using the cards, add to their sentence, adding and removing as they go to
create longer, more interesting sentences.
Apostrophe drama. Divide students into teams before reading out a word
with an apostrophe. Students then arrange their bodies into letter shapes,
with the apostrophe in the right place. Students could also be given paper/
mini whiteboards to simply write the word.
Carousel tables. Set up folders containing different punctuation rules and
some accompanying tasks / questions for common SPaG problem areas.
Distribute these on different tables and let students work through them at
their own pace. A quiz may be necessary for those who finish early!
Grammar dice. Use a dice template and fill in each side with word classes.
Students throw the dice and write down an example of the term they’ve
thrown. Once they’ve collected enough terms they make a full sentence.
Plural suffixes. Use mini whiteboards with the class to write the plural
version of common words. Do they take ‘s’, ‘es’ or ‘ies’? A nice extension
task for more able students is to get them to try and identify the spelling
rule.
Internet games. There are numerous useful SPaG sites on the internet,
many of which are targeted at EAL learners. Try:
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http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/
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