Teaching proper language and grammar usage to children at the primary age is critical, as we all know. Students need to know how to properly construct a sentence with sentence structure, and they also need to understand capitalization and punctuation. Along with these skills, children need to understand how to utilize all of those “little things” that the English language entails. Some examples would be: parts of speech, singular and plural possessives, commas, apostrophes, colons and semi-colons, plurals, and so much more! I have found a few ways that I feel have improved my students’ capabilities with Language Arts in the elementary classroom. (2nd grade in particular!)
1. My favorite book that I use every single day (with no exceptions) focuses on Daily Oral Language. These books are available for each grade level and are numbered from day 1 all the way through the end of the year. There are so many skills covered in this book and the skills are cumulative throughout the year. I attach the daily math practice sheets from the same company to the back of the language skills sheet for an overall morning review/lesson each day. I feel that the oral daily language skills covered in this book are very helpful for my students when test time comes around at the end of the year. After the students complete their language sheet each morning, I have them take out a colored pencil and we go over the skills in depth. Instead of just correcting the “bugs” (my word for errors) and moving on, we correct EACH one, and then state why we did what we did. For example, if a child tells me a sentence needs a period, they have to tell me it needs one because that sentence is a “telling sentence”, a “statement”, and a “declarative”. I do this with just about every skill so that when test time comes up, they aren’t surprised by any new terminology!
I would highly suggest that every primary aged teacher buy this book as it will assist you in your Daily Oral Language exercises - you WON’T be sorry!
Purchase it at Amazon.com!
Daily Language Review Grade 2 (Daily Language Review)
2. I also have other teacher friends who like the following Language book. It also has lesson for 180 days, but it only has sentence corrections as far as I know. I prefer the Daily Oral Language book mentioned above because it has addition language skills along with the sentence error corrections. It might be an excellent supplemental teaching tool to use though!
Purchase it at Amazon.com!
Daily Oral Language Grade 2: 180 Lessons and 18 Assessments
3. Teaching analogies and idioms can also be a part of figurative language lesson plans and language instruction. I like to give my students an idiom each morning and they write down what they think it means and illustrate a picture of it in their analogy journal. We go over the idioms and then they write what it actually means. My children really get a kick out of these each day.
Here is a fun analogy book at Amazon.com!
Here’s a great book on idioms at Amazon.com!
You can also go to UsingEnglish.com to get an A to Z list of over 1,500 idioms used in the English language! This is a neat tool to browse through when looking for a specific idiom or for just finding new ones!
4. Writer’s Workshop is also a great way to teach language skills to primary aged children. By the usage of mini-lessons, teacher conferences, peer response groups, the author’s chair, and most importantly The Writing Process, students are opened up to a whole new way of learning about language! The following are a couple of books that will be helpful in getting your students started with Writer’s Workshop!
Here’s another one at Amazon.com!
If you have any tips or ideas to add, please share them in the comment section below!
Good luck with those language skills in the primary and elementary classroom!!
