20 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.

20 teaching ideas for SPaG

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!

20 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.

20 teaching ideas for SPaG Internet games. There are numerous useful SPaG sites on the internet, many of which are targeted at EAL learners. Try:

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/ http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/