The most frequent complaint I hear from my teachers is “When am I supposed to teach grammar? And punctuation?” After all they teach reading workshop and writing workshop and spelling and guided reading and have read-alouds and think-alouds. There’s not enough time in the day to do everything!
One of my over-arching questions is how can we teach grammar and punctuation effectively? Last week I gave a workshop to our elementary school teachers about Jeff Anderson’s method, EveryDay Editing. EveryDay Editing takes an authorial rather than a secretarial approach to teaching conventions–in other words we look at why authors choose certain conventions and how they use them to improve the quality of their writing.
The slide show that is linked below contains three different examples of the EveryDay Editing framework for different grade levels. Following the examples are “How To” instructions of how to create your own lessons and framework slides for you to use.
Enjoy!