Do your students’ eyes glaze over when you begin a grammar lesson? Or worse, do they play dead? If so, you need Beyond Worksheets: Creative Lessons for Teaching Grammar in Middle School and High School.
Beyond Worksheets contains 21 innovative and creative lesson plans that can all be adapted to homeschool as well as used in the classroom. These lessons are designed to be used along with your grammar book.
What teachers say about the book:
“I love any teaching ideas that get away from using worksheets everyday. Awesome purchase!!”
“Thank you. Great teaching tool.”
“Thanks for such a fabulous resource.”
“Excellent resource for middle school.”
“I love the detailed explanation of each activity.”
Sample Lesson – Song Titles
This lesson seems to really interest the students. I use it as an introductory lesson to teach (or review) the difference among sentences, sentence fragments, and sentence run-ons.
I ask the students to write in their notebooks the titles of a few of their favorite songs – any songs will do. They will probably ask if you want them to write the artist’s name, too, but, of course, they don’t need to. Also, I usually ask them to include at least one fairly long song title of maybe five words or longer.
Ask for volunteers to name their songs. Write a list of song titles on the board, making sure you write some that are complete sentences and some that are fragments. If you are really lucky, you will find a run-on, but they are rare! (You can always use “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”!) Write some down that are sentences even though they are very short and then maybe some long titles that are not sentences. Then, go down the list and ask the students whether each song title is a complete sentence, a fragment, or a run-on. It is great if you can get a title that begins with because, if, since, etc., since those words begin dependent clauses, and some of the students will think they are complete sentences.
The students will see that some very short titles are actually complete sentences and some very long titles may not be.
The students love to give you their song titles, so you can have fun with this for a while.
*This exercise will work with homeschoolers and small groups as well as large classes.
More Lesson Plans You Will Find in Beyond Worksheets:
- Jeopardy
- Madlibs
- Build a Sentence
- Grab Bag
- Pass-Around Story
- Row Races
- Roots Bingo
- Conjunction Brain Twister
- Appendix A: Sample List of Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes
- Appendix B: Sample Madlib
