A Comprehensive Guide To English Grammar- Part 1

I was an English Writing major before I earned my M.ED and became a teacher. I tell you this because the fact that I really didn’t know English grammar even AFTER I earned two degrees is pretty awful. I could tell students that something SOUNDED incorrect, but I was incapable of telling them WHY it actually was incorrect grammatically.

My reaction to this setback was to teach myself grammar, BUT, since I didn’t have a logical progression for learning it, I found myself continuously confused by seemingly contradictory rules! So, I developed my own logical progression which has taken the shape of an interactive Google Slide show that is well over 100 slides in length.

I can’t present it all here, but I will provide screenshots of a lot of it. I must assume that the reader knows what nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are. With that understood, the most logical place to begin unraveling grammar is with:

THE FIVE ROLES OF NOUNS

Any noun in any sentence will serve as ONE and ONLY one of five roles within the sentence. The roles are determined by the tyoe of verb present and the presence or absence of prepositions.

The first of the five roles is:

To make teaching subjects more lively I use this video clip:

One of my students actually did this to my stapler!

Then the students learn that:

Of course, sometimes more than one noun serves as the subject. So, in order to teach that, I use this video in which Jim uses Pavlovian thinking to fool Dwight:

Then using this incredible program called Pear Deck, students can actually type in their answers which I can then show!

Using Pear Deck allows students to type their answers from their seats on to the frame. I require them to use their names!

Once you find the verb- which is “manipulated” and the answers are Jim, Pavlov ( not AND!). So, the subjects here are both names!

We then move on to the second role that nouns can function as:

I use a lot of videos but this one is my favorite as it stars two of my children doing the “Tortilla Challenge”:

In case you don’t feel like sitting through the video, you could say “The tortilla hit the girl”. The verb here is “hit” , so you ask “WHAT hit?” and “tortilla” is the subject. Then, you ask “The tortilla hit WHOM?” and “girl” is the direct object .

If anyone is interested in this stuff in visual form, I do provide that in a library for students. Here is what that looks like :