I decided to co-teach grammar because I thought it would provide me with an opportunity to learn how to be a more effective teacher. I never thought that I would learn how to better parse sentences. I have been working with clauses and phrases and I finally have a clear picture of how they function in a sentence, and now I feel empowered to teach students about grammatical deconstruction, though I wish we would have spent more time on sentence diagramming, which would help in visually illustrating the breakdown of the sentence.
Do I think knowing grammar thoroughly is helpful in teaching grammar? Absolutely. Not because I want to tell my students the grammar terms, but because I can assist a student with any sentence, helping them examine the parts that make up its whole and in so doing, give them a better understanding about how the terms they learn in class come together in a sentence.
We need to devote more class time to working on sentence breakdown. I will have the students do that March 22, and hopefully it will be a successful exercise.
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