Activities that make grammar fun

When I was in high school, much of English class focused on grammar: diagramming sentences & doing exercise after exercise. We learned the grammar rules but, boy, was it dull. Students today aren’t as patient when it comes to sitting through grammar lessons, and while I don’t believe we need to entertain our students. there are activities that make grammar fun.

In this post, I’ll cover:

• The importance of making grammar relevant
• How teaching grammar in context shows students why it’s is important
• Ways to create exercises that make grammar fun
• How to use games and challenges to teach grammar
• Why stations are the perfect strategy for teaching & learning grammar

Show students why grammar is important

“Make it relevant” is my number one “rule” for anything I teach. We humans like to see why something is useful or going to make our lives better. Take exercise, for example. It may not be “fun” when you get started, but you know that it’s going to help you be healthy.

Teaching grammar and letting your students know why it’s important – beyond writing a test or losing marks on an assignment – is the first step to getting them to pay attention.

And why is it? Well, first and foremost, there are many rules and conventions that exist for ease of communication. Putting punctuation marks and phrases in the right place leads to clarity; people understand your message.

So, before you teach any grammar lessons, you can start with examples that illustrate how “bad” grammar affects clarity. There are tons of memes out there that you can use for a little comic effect. It would also be fun to group students and ask them to make up some examples of funny grammar errors.

👉🏻 check out my posters (they come with an activity too!)

After you’ve had some fun establishing how poor grammar can affect clarity, you can move on to teaching some of these conventions.

Teach grammar lessons in context

When showing students why grammar is important, teaching it in context makes a big difference. Use the texts students are reading to show them how good writers create strong sentences. Then, they can apply these to their own writing.

For example, I used a passage from What If It’s Us?  by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera to demonstrate some comma rules. Students read the text and identified how the writers used commas to create a strong voice.

Then, I used it as an opportunity to discuss comma rules. Students read their own novels after the lesson and looked for ways that their authors created voice with commas. Finally, I asked them to find one of their previously written journal entries and to revise it, using commas to create a stronger voice.

I always found that doing activities like this – ones that are placed in context – are FAR more effective than isolated grammar lessons and exercises. Students were engaged and enjoyed the process of learning how commas can make their writing stronger. They may have even said that grammar was fun!

Strategies to increase engagement during grammar lessons:

It’s always good to teach grammar in context, but sometimes students need to do some practice exercises to solidify the concept. When you do use grammar exercises, use your students’ names or situations.

Write a short paragraph that uses their names or that focuses on something they can relate to. I create a funny little story that keeps them engaged and even laughing as they work through the sentences. You can find an example of that here.

NOTE: Sometimes students need some lessons on the parts of speech as building blocks for understanding how grammar works. If you want some engaging lessons for that – click here.

Games, challenges, and stations are activities that make grammar fun

Games and challenges are a great way to get students engaged with grammar. I always wanted them to see how authors create strong sentences, so we would do grammar scavenger hunts with the texts they were reading. Depending on which aspect of grammar we needed to review, I would give them a list of four or five types of sentences to find in their texts – each one would illustrate an example of a grammar rule.

For example, I might ask them to find a sentences that illustrate multiple comma rules or the use of a semicolon or colon. I would also ask them to look for places where authors broke the rules – for a reason.  Grab a FREE grammar scavenger hunt to try this with your students.

You can also do some tactile-kinesthetic activities to help your students improve their grammar, like the ones I have for Theirs, Yours, & Its and for fused sentencs.

Another way to make grammar fun is by using learning stations. Do a full review of a concept and then send students though a rotation that has them hit each one. Or, you can group students according to the areas they need to work on, and send them to the stations that focus on the errors that they are actually making.

Let’s look more closely at how this works: group goes to a station that reviews pronoun errors while group two goes to the one that focuses on sentence fragments. This way, instead of each student listening to a review of an error that other students are making, they are getting extra practice with the ones that they need to improve.

✅  You can check out my grammar stations here.

✅   Get more tips for teaching grammar authentically here!

Let me know if you have any questions!