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Creative Ways to Teach Grammar to Young Students

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We are pleased to present this guest post by Sarah Perowne. Enjoy!

Early exposure to grammar and grammatical structures in the ESL classroom is important for fluency and language development. Still, a lot of the advice for young students is about drilling vocabulary and using flashcards. While these activities have their place in the ESL classroom, they are not the only ways to teach grammar and English. Here, we’ll give you some creative ways to teach grammar that can be easily adapted to your classrooms and any age, regardless of whether they’re online or off!

Drama & Theater

Drama and theater are fantastic ways to put grammar instruction into practice. Instead of abstract rules, students see how scripts and stories rely on grammar, emotion, and movement to convey information to the audience. As we all know, being confident in a language means knowing the grammar patterns and how native speakers use them, not just how a grammar book tells us.

Puppetry (Ages 2-8, Groups and Individual)

You can use puppets and storytelling to narrate a simple story that contains examples of the grammar concept you want to teach to keep children engaged. As you tell the story, emphasize and repeat phrases or sentences that illustrate the target grammar. If you’re focusing on the past simple tense, for example, most fairytales are typically told in this tense, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel.

Mantle Of The Expert (Ages 5+, Small Groups)

I love using Mantle of the Expert to teach grammar. It’s an immersive and inquiry-based teaching strategy designed by Dorothy Heathcote and is a great way to get kids actively participating. Mantle of the Expert works by assigning roles to your students, making them “experts” in a specific grammar topic. Some ideas could be a punctuation detective or an order of adjectives specialist. Once your students have a role, you introduce a problem or challenge. Students then work together to solve the problem using their “expertise” in the field. Encourage them to discuss and apply their grammar knowledge, then hold a reflection session after the activity!

Stick To The Script! (Ages 7+, Pairs and Small Groups)

You can’t have a play without a script, and you can’t have a script without grammar! This one is easy to set up and teaches children the significance of different grammar and punctuation in a written text. Simply get your hands on a script, either printed or projected for the kids to read and then give them another script with the same lines but the grammar altered! For example, a script that reads “Let’s eat Grandma” and “Let’s eat, Grandma” have completely different meanings, and their stories lead in wildly different directions!

Creative Game Ideas

Games are the bread and butter of any ESL grammar lesson for young learners. However, don’t go for something predictable like flashcards or a pop quiz. Here are some creative ways you can use games to teach grammatical structures and topics.

Grammar Review Bingo for (Ages 5+, Any Size Groups)

Create blank bingo cards with separate sentence strips containing your target grammar topic or topics. On the bingo card, get your students to write the grammar topics you want to cover in each square. For example, if you’re working on adjectives, prepositions, and nouns, they can copy the category names onto their bingo card. You will read the sentence strips aloud; each time they identify the correct category from a word in the sentence, they mark or cover the category square on their bingo card. For example, if the sentence contains the word “big,” they would cover the “Adjectives” square.

Top Teachers Tip: Laminate the bingo cards so you can use them again!

Online Digital Worksheets

You can easily gamify worksheets and flashcards and make them more engaging for students when you use them digitally; plus, it saves on printing and paper and is perfect for online teaching. WordTips has a ton of digitized grammar worksheets for ESL teachers, including noun and verb worksheets for beginners, helping verbs worksheets, or parts of speech with digital flashcards.

Mad Libs (Ages 5+, Any Size Groups)

A beloved grammar game that you might not have thought about! Mad Libs allows kids to use grammar to create hilarious stories. Played in groups, start by creating a made-up story, but invite the kids to add their own nouns, verbs, and adjectives as you go! Every story will be completely different, and the silliness continues each time. If capable, the children can lead themselves, providing fresh words for unique twists and a ton of fun!

Grandmother’s Cat (Ages 5+, Any Size Groups)

Grandmother’s Cat is an adverb practice game that requires no tools or preparation. Kids take turns completing the sentence, “My grandmother’s cat is _____,” with adjectives beginning with A, then B, and slowly working your way through the alphabet. You may have tried this yourself on a long car ride or plane journey, and it sometimes goes by the name, The Alphabet Game. It’s super simple to learn but will keep you engaged in grammar in a super fun way!

Use The World Around You

Explore The Outdoors (Any Age, Groups, and Individual)

Teaching grammar through outdoor exploration engages children in a hands-on way. For example, scavenger hunts can teach nouns and adjectives as kids search and describe the objects they find. Nature walks can inspire sentence formation and storytelling as kids try to describe the world around them. When it comes to the outside, you’re only limited by your imagination!

Music & Singing (Any Age, Groups, and Individual)

Music is an international language, and using it to teach grammar is a fantastic way to engage young kids. Song lyrics contain so many grammatical elements, such as verbs, nouns, order of adjectives, and adverbs. Analyzing lyrics or creating song parodies can reinforce these ideas and make learning more enjoyable. Singing also helps pronunciation and listening skills, exploring grammar through rhythm and melody in the most fun way!

Anywhere And Everywhere (Any Age, Group, and Individual)

Grammar is everywhere, literally. Any text, speech, recording, or sound can teach kids about language. Whether observing street signs and creating sentences using them or describing the animals you see on a trip to the store, grammar can be taught and learned anywhere. By integrating grammar into real-world scenarios, children connect language to the world they exist in, making learning engaging, practical, and more obviously valuable.

Word Games (Any Age, Group, and Individual)

Word games are a fantastic way to teach kids English grammar because they’re fun and competitive. Try using Scrabble pieces to create words and order sentences or to practice CVC fluency and word patterns. Another idea could be to use an online word finder when you’re running out of planning time to generate a targeted vocabulary list for your grammar quizzes. You could show students the tool, give them a list of letters, and have them sort the generated words into grammar categories. Once they’ve done this, they can use the categories in many ways.

  • Grammar rule presentations.
  • A whole group discussion about specific grammar patterns and rules.
  • Grammar challenges where students create original sentences or stories using the generated words and categories.
  • Grammar treasure hunt.

With careful planning and a little outside-the-box thinking, there are tons of creative ways to teach grammar. So, we hope we’ve inspired you to make English a lot more fun for your youngest students beyond traditional flashcards and teacher-talk instruction.

Fun Facts About English #61 – The Inclusive and Exclusive ‘We’

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Fun Facts About English 61 Kinney Brothers Publishing

The recently coined term, clusivity, (Filimonova, Clusivity, 2005) is defined as “a grammatical distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology,” aka the inclusive “we” and exclusive “we.”

English is one of the few languages that does not have separate words for “we” that includes the listener, and “we” that excludes the listener.

Inclusive and exclusive we Kinney Brothers Publishing

The distinction is either evident from context or can be understood through additional wording. Consider the sentences below. Without their accompanying sentences, there is no context to determine whether they include or exclude the listener.

  • We’re going to the beach! Are you ready yet?
  • We’re going to the beach! See you later!

Other first-person plural pronouns (us, our, ours, ourselves) are also affected by this inclusive/exclusive conundrum.

  • We have to do the work ourselves. Let’s get to work.
  • We have to do the work ourselves. Thanks for nothing!

When teaching English language learners, with a few such examples, even beginners can grasp the use of we. For more advanced learners, there are a number of atypical uses where we is used in place of I or you.

Royal we – traditionally employed by a person of high office such as a monarch or pope, it is often used today by anyone in a position of authority.
“We are not amused by your behavior, Mr. Jones.”

Editorial we – used when actually giving one’s own opinion:
“When listening to Donald Trump, we feel a strong sense of patriotism.”

Author’s we – a practice of referring to a generic third person as we:
“By adding four and five, we get nine.”

You – used to replace you with we when addressing a second party:
Parent to child: “Are we doing our homework or are we watching TV?”

You might also be interested in these posts about the peculiarities of the English language! Did you know every day and everyday have different meanings? What does the X in LAX mean? Why do we say pease porridge and not pea porridge? What the heck does paddywhack mean?

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Donald's English Classroom

When you’re looking for a deal on learning materials, look no further than Donald’s English Classroom! From textbooks to game sets, check out all our bundled materials so you can save and start downloading today!

Fun Facts About English #53 – Peas

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Fun Facts About English 53 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Teaching plurals was a regular part of my ESL classes in Japan. English language learners have to memorize singular and plural forms and how to properly use them, such as “I got my hair cut” and not “I got my hairs cut,” or “I went to a shoe shop” as opposed to a “shoes shop.”

No less than the myriad rules for making nouns plural, we also have to contend with spelling variants, irregular nouns, word imports, counters, and archaic forms — issues that drive even native English speakers mad! In a past Fun Facts About English post I gave examples of often mistaken and just plain confusing plurals. In this post, I’d like to focus on one particular case: peas.

peas Kinney Brothers Publishing

When in elementary school, my siblings and I regularly came home for lunch. One day, to our surprise, Dad was home and, double surprise, had fixed us all lunch! He served up grilled cheese sandwiches (yea!) and a green soup he called “pea soup.” A hue and cry went up among us and we demanded he tell us what kind of soup it really was. Of course, none of us were going to be fooled into believing “pee soup” was a real thing! Dad just kept laughing at us. Finally, he brought out the empty Campbell’s Soup can and showed us Pea Soup written on the can. We all breathed a sigh of relief… sort of. We still thought it was super weirdo soup. Dad sure had a good time feeding the kids that day and a clear example of the rule for attributive nouns was fixed in my memory.

Some may remember a childhood rhyme called Pease Porridge Hot:

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

If pease porridge is made with peas, why isn’t it called “pea” porridge? We don’t say ‘beans soup’ or ‘carrots juice.’ Is it just a British thing? Are pea dishes avoided in polite company because of the homonym? This is the kind of issue that would throw a wrench in my English lessons!

Here’s the answer:

Peasen is the archaic word for that member of the legume family we know today as peas. Peasen is plural and the singular is pease. Because pease ends with a /z/ sound and the seeds of the plant appear countable, pease was often mistaken for and reinterpreted as the plural form. Over time, this lead to the back-formation of a new singular: pea.

So, pease porridge, or pease pudding, as it’s sometimes called, maintains the archaic but correct singular spelling and pronunciation for a dish that is still enjoyed in England today. Here in the U.S., I’ve eschewed my finicky ways and embrace just about any kind of soup, even one made with peas.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in reading about the lingual conga line of stacked adjectives, what happens when words rebracket over time, or the headache of writing headlines for newspapers!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Donald's English Classroom

When building students’ English vocabulary, I Have/Who Has activities are great for reading, speaking, and listening! Check out my post A Game With Legs to see how versatile this simple game is!

Fun Facts About English #17 – Average Vocabulary Size

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Most experts believe that the English language has about one million words. Difficult to determine and not easy to agree on, the problem rests in defining what represents a discrete “word.” It’s important to remember that this number includes different forms of the same word, or lemmas, e.g., run, running, ran, plus archaic words not commonly used in modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a mere 171,476 words that are in current use.

Besides word counting, for individuals there’s a distinction between receptive knowledge — referring to our passive vocabulary, and productive or active knowledge — words we use when speaking and writing. As a rule of thumb, our receptive vocabulary is at least twice the size of our productive vocabulary.

Studies show that the average native English speaker knows about 20,000 words with a university-educated person knowing around 40,000 words. When speaking and writing (emails, letters, notes, etc.) this goes down to about 5,000 very common words that are used repeatedly.

Building vocabulary skills is a priority for many native speakers and non-native learners of English alike. The benefits include social and professional mobility as well as cognitive improvement. If you teach English as a foreign language, or you’re looking to expand your horizons abroad, check out the article, How to Teach English to Kids, from IELTS Podcast, a company dedicated to helping ESL students improve their reading, writing, and speaking skills.

Try this Ghent University (Belgium) online to test to estimate your English vocabulary size. Good luck! If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in the history of American spelling bees, or how American and British English diverged over the centuries!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Donald's English Classroom

Stories for Young Readers is a graded textbook series designed to extend students’ skills and interest in developing their ability to communicate in English. To learn more, visit Kinney Brothers Publishing or check out all the textbook downloads from Donald’s English Classroom.

UNO

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UNO is a trademarked game from Mattel

Think UNO is just a quiet game of number and color matching?  Think again! 

UNO is a great game for getting your students speaking!  I use it to get my students to practice all of the following language:

  • This is a…
  • That is a …
  • These are …
  • Those are…
  • What is this?
  • What is that?
  • What are these?
  • What are those?
  • Not
  • Colors
  • numbers

Here is an example of how I use it in a class where students are learning to use the basic sentence structure, “This is a …”:

Deal out seven cards to each student and play the game as usual, only students must say what they are laying down.  For example, if a student is going to lay down a yellow 2, she must say, “This is a Yellow 2.”  The play then goes to the next student.  Let’s say he lays down a Green 2.  He must say, “This is a Green 2.”  Play the game in this fashion until one of the students lays down all of the cards in her hand and wins.

The special cards in the deck are as follows:

  • This is a Wild Draw 4
  • This is a Wild card
  • This is a Green Draw 2
  • This is a Red Skip
  • This is a Blue Reverse

When the students start contrasting ‘this’ and ‘that’, bring that to the game.  Now, students must say what the previous student laid down before saying what they are about to lay down:  “That is a Yellow 2.  This is a Blue Skip.”

As the students progress further, the expectations for play expand as well.  For example, when the students are learning plurals, and the contrasting words ‘these’ and ‘those’, support this by incorporating them into the game.  When a student has two or more of the same card in his hand, he can now lay them all down at once, saying, “These are Red 7’s”.  The next student must then say, “Those are Red 7’s before saying what he is about to lay down.  In this game now, students are contrasting ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, and ‘those’.

Have your students learned ‘not’?  Throw it in!  Now when a student lays down a card, she must first say what it is not, and then what it is:  “This is not a Green 9.  This is a Blue 4.”  And for added fun, the students can be allowed to say anything that their card is not:  “This is not a gorilla!  This is a Blue 4.”

And of course, you play the game in which students ask questions too!  In this case, the student would lay her card down and ask the next student, “What is this?”  The next student must answer, “That is a Green 8,” before laying down her own card and asking the next student the appropriate question.

As you can see, there are a lot of options for using UNO to support the language you are teaching.  Give it a try, and let us know how it goes, and how you might have used it differently!  Or maybe you have another card game that you like to use to get your students talking.  Please let us know.  We’d love to hear about it!

Mike