Upper elementary through high school
- Reinforces and assesses correct English usage
Strategy steps:
- Develop a list of sentence pairs, one grammatically correct and the other incorrect. For example, if the students need work on subject-verb agreement with to be verbs is and are, develop sentences such as:
- The students are in math class.
- The students is in math class.
- Teach/review rules for using is and are in relation to singular and plural nouns.
- Have children identify the relevant noun (students) as singular or plural.
- Ask them if are is the correct verb and why.
- Follow the same steps for the second sentence.
- After the students have practiced with several similar pairs of sentences, have them work independently or with partners to complete a different set of sentence pairs.
- Students compare their work and discuss any responses that don’t agree.
Follow similar steps for other syntactic structures that are difficult for the students.