Grammar Wednesday

Instead of giving you another grammar lesson, I’ve decided that I’m going to use today’s post to download my thinking about how to put together a grammar class.

I was tasked with teaching a grammar class this semester, and I’ve kind of been winging it since the first day of the course.  I mean, really, there’s not much to it; it’s not as though a class like this requires a whole lot of advanced planning (at least, it wouldn’t require it of someone who has a pretty good grasp of the material at the outset).

What I seem to be having trouble with, though, is the organization.  I’ve got a zillion different resources from a zillion different places, and having it all put together in a neat, organized, searchable way is something that I fantasize about.  I’ve been thinking, for the last few days, about putting together a binder that has all the materials I would need to teach this class again, without having to go through all the paper shuffling.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

Let’s imagine a 15 week course where the students meet for an hour a day.  I think the semester will start with the parts of speech and all their component parts:

nouns (singular, plural and possessive; concrete and abstract; proper and common; count, non-count, and collective)

verbs (active and passive, transitive and intransitive, helping/linking)

pronouns and all their cases (and there are a lot of them)

adverbs and adverb phrases

adjectives and adjective phrases

conjunctions

interjections

prepositions

articles (there are only three of these – the, a, and an – so this will be a short lesson)

I’m going to try to find a big old three-ring binder and start stashing my parts of speech resources all in one place…