Grammar Instruction

In the 2 readings we were assigned, a blog post written by Patricia Dunn titled "Does Bad 'Grammar' Instruction Make Writing Worse?" and the article "Teaching Grammar in the Context of Writing" written by Constance Weaver both authors discuss their views on teaching grammar and some ideas of how teachers should go about teaching grammar. 

In the article written by Constance Weaver I found it interesting how there is so much research and information on the affects of grammar instruction. I really liked how there were so many examples on what not to do with your students because it gave me a better understanding and better ideas to have for when I'm a teacher. For example, letting your students make mistakes in their writing so that they aren't afriad to try new things & branch out from their normal writing. There were many things the article explained NOT to do, for exmaple; teaching traditional grammar (those annoying worksheets you used to be handed everyday in english class) and not using difficult grammatical terminology. 

In the blog post written by Patricia Dunn, she discusses that we should encourage our students to be engaged in their writing. Dunn believes that grammar drills can interfere with the students ability to actively engage in their writing, meaning that having gramma worksheets for the students to do is not helping your students but making them hate learning about grammar. 

Something that I really liked about Weavers article were the 3 teachers who told their stories on teaching grammar and the things that worked & didn't work for them. I like Sarah's idea of making mini-lessons in a writer's workshop to teach her students grammar but by making it enjoyable. Each student wrote a five senses poem and then a couple weeks later had her students write another senses poem & it showed that her students poems were much better the second time around because of her mini-lessons.