So its the final post, and oh how many I am about that! 2 weeks of nothing but summer…oh wait, and work. Yeah lots of work :/ but no assignments, no more lesson plans, no more worrying that I forgot to turn something in on time! Woot woot! And in 2 weeks we will start our SENIOR year! Crazy right?!

Lets see, what have I learned in these eight weeks? That summer classes are quick and you gotta keep on your toes to keep up! I also learned that I suck at grammar, and all things related to it, and that I also don’t suck at it. I know, I know pick one right. I suck at a lot of it, but I am better at a lot of it than I previously thought. And there is a lot of it I am still learning about! Grammar has never been my friend, it has been that girl you just hate, that no matter how hard you try to find a reason to like, you cant. But now after these eight weeks, I have decided that she has a nice smile, and pretty hair. And will give you her last piece of gum if you say please. I have learned to look at the good in grammar, and I will keep doing that. I have also learned that I am not the only one who sucks at grammar. That to some degree we all do! Even the gentleman who wrote the textbook we used this semester admitted to it!

I learned to like Grammar Girl, and might stick with her. We could be pals. I liked how we used different forums for our information. Yes we had a textbook, but a good one. But we also had videos and websites, and tumblr, and each other to learn from. I was a bit worries at the beginning of this class for those things, looking at tumblr the first day I was like “kayyyy….now what do I do with this? And how will this help me with grammar?!” but I now see the light, and have enjoyed this 8 weeks. I liked being able to read my classmate’s responses, and responding to them. Overall this was an enjoyable course, and a good way to end the summer. So with that, I wish you all a happy ending 2 weeks to your summer, and will see you all shortly.  

cev09:

I was SO excited to see all of the Grammar Rock videos for this week. I was a huge Schoolhouse Rock fan as a kid and remember why: the songs are so catchy! I had “Unpacked My Adjectives” stuck in my head for hours after watching that video. I think that songs like these are an excellent way to…

Casey,

I have to agree with you about why I loved the videos as a kid too. I found my self singing the songs in my head later that day at work and couldn’t help but laugh and think about to my childhood of singing along with my brothers. I think that when you connect the different fields that you are experienced in and making them into ways to help your students that is so great. We all have different strengths and using those in ways that can benefit our students and their education is so awesome, and those students will be so lucky that you think this way. Teachers have become more and more willing to incorporate fun ways of teaching into the school day, and this allows students to get more and more interested in what they are being taught. I wish some of my teachers has found more fun and interesting ways to teach me some lessons, I might have payed more attention!

coralintheclassroom:

What a fun week we had! I would like to give a shout out to “Schoolhouse Rock” for still rockin’ after all these years. My parents grew up watching these clips in between Saturday morning cartoons and bought the VHS versions for me when I was in elementary school. I fully support using these…

Coral,

I agree with you when it comes to the grammar girl you picked for the week. For the younger students I think coming up with fun little ways for them to remember the right choices is a great idea. When it comes to older students I think your if it sounds wrong it probably is theory is a good way to go. Teaching students to think about it themselves, and trusting what they have learned is key. As a grammar failure over the years I always second guessed myself, and ended up getting more things wrong. We can usually tell if something is off, or doesn’t sound right, so go with it!
I really like how each week in your posts you reflect on the lessons we are learning and how they effect you, but more importantly how they will effect your future classroom. You always have goals for your classroom and your future students and I think that is beyond awesome. Having a clear idea of what kind of teacher you want to be and what things are important to you as a teacher will make you and your classroom even more awesome!

Yay School House Rock! I remember watching these as a kid and singing along to them all. I even found myself still singing along a little bit now. It is hard for me to say which one would be my favorite because as a kid I loved them all, and they all helped me in their own ways. I loved Conjunction Junction as a kid and wished it was here. :[

I like the idea of getting students in a mind set for prepositions by allowing them to watch Busy Prepositions before hand. I think it would allow the students to begin to think about how the words are used before they have to practice it themselves.

I think unpack your adjectives would be great for students to be able to see am example of how they can create an adjective out of a verb or a noun. I think between using the unpack your adjectives video and the lolly lolly lolly get your adverbs here video we could show students a way to understand and differentiate between adjectives and adverbs. All of the videos are great tools for students to learn the parts of speech and their functions.

I like the preposition poetry lesson, and think that it is an interesting way to get students to think about how they use grammar and how they can use it in a fun and interesting way. Allowing students to use their creativity in the classroom is a great tool, and will allow for the teacher to reach the students on a different level. Grammar is rarely a subject students cheer about, but teaching it in fun new ways could change that.

For the grammar girl this week I chose it is I vs It is me.

I thought this was interesting because as I was thinking about it I wasn’t sure myself. With what grammar girl teaches us in this lesson we learn that in a instance like when answering the phone “this is she” would not be correct, but “this is I” is actually the correct way to go. Looks like I was wrong with that one! But it is interesting to think about and now I know for the future!

amaige:

Me reading a book:

When people tell me I should slow down because I’ll finish too quickly:

When I finish the book and have nothing else to read:

 

Alright so it is already week 6 and it is crazy to think classes are almost over and a breather is coming! Grammar Girl is…

I think its funny how every week while reading my classmates responses we see that everyone has had that time when they have been disappointed in themselves because they used grammar wrong, and well we are all human! English majors or not! (I use exclamation points too much too!)

I love youtube for everything. I feel like it is coming into its own when it comes to the educational aspects of it. We all know we can get on youtube for a good laugh but now people are realizing we can learn from it too! It shows us what we are looking for, and usually in a more entertaining way that will hold our attention or our future students attention.

 btw love the pictures!

jld09d:

First off, I’m glad we got to see a video that really explained the comma splice. It’s something that has driven me crazy for a long time because so many teachers look at it differently. I thought by my freshman year in college I had the comma down pat, but then I took History of Asia, and my TA…

I know how you feel about commas, and I agree with you trusting the lit teacher over the history TA. I had the same problem in Modern Popular Music and got so frustrated that the ta was correcting my incorrectly.

I think the Grammar Girl topic of can you start a sentence with because was interesting. Most people think the same thing and think no ive always been told I cant. But I think at a younger age we are taught not to because it is easier than teaching all the rules and allowing the students to be able to understand when you can use it.

Even knowing this “rule of no” we have taught have you ever found yourself using it? I have and thats when I went looking to see if I was right or wrong in using it.  

For week 6 the Coordinating Conjunctions video was interesting and was a nice little refresher. I always love mnemonic devices and I think they are a great learning tool for students. My mom (a former teacher) started me on them when I was very little and some of them still pop into my head from time to time. FANBOYS is a great thing for students, and would allow them to help study. The textbook offers students many helpful tips on how to teach students about colons, semicolons, and many others. This textbook allows us to think about how we can use these lessons in our classrooms and gives us great sources to use and reference in the future.

The grammar girl podcast I chose for this week was the Commas with participial phrases. I chose this podcast because I thought it would be good to have a little refresher on this topic. I was looking at the list and wasnt even fully sure what a participial phase was. The podcast talks about how restrictive and non- restrictive clauses.

I think that the podcasts are a great way for us to think about what we know and what we know well. And the things we know but not super well we can review and think about. Plus we can think about all grammar as students but also as teachers. We can think about how we use them and about how we will teach them in the future to our students.  

cev09:

Though I was disappointed to learn about racial profiling by voice, I wasn’t surprised to hear that the results of that experiment turned out as they did. I don’t think someone’s dialect is always specific to their race, but it clearly can often be an indicator. That video reminded me of when I…

Casey,

I know how you feel when your parent would correct you for saying ain’t or y’all. Ever since I was a child my dad would always point out that people in the north would say wooder instead of water. And whenever we would say wooder he would point out that wooder doesn’t sound as refreshing as water,m and he would much rather have a water than a wooder. I now years later find myself correcting my mother, and even my father once in a while about this, instead of the other way around.

I like what you had to say about the grammar girl podcast you chose and how it can work in the right setting. People need to think of these things, and where the people that are saying them are coming from,and how they were brought up.

coralintheclassroom:

Well, not really. I confess to you, my professor and classmates, that I thought I would be able to complete my homework (verbs practice) without researching first. After only three items, I knew how wrong I had been! This site was a wonderful refresher for categorizing verbs, something I had not…

Coral,

I like the way you simply state things, and think about how you would explain them in ways that your future students would understand. I agree that when talking about farther if we should the students it had far in the beginning it will allow them to make a connection to distance. This made me think of when I was a child and my mother taught me the differences between there, their, and they’re. She pointed out the I in their and told me to think if I as myself and other people. She told me that for there think if HERE and of places. Little things like this end up sticking with us much longer than we think, sometimes I still explain it to my friends that way when they use the wrong form.

I agree with you about the discrimination, whether it be on the phone like you pointed out, in the classroom, or anywhere else it is not fair! While I don’t think certain language should be used in schools, and it is our jobs as teacher to correct students grammar and language usage, I do not think we would think less of a student because of this. We see it even with ourselves, im sure each and every one of us uses different language while talking to our professors than we do while sitting at the bar chatting with our friends. Maybe no one has taught these students that ain’t isn’t a real work, and it is not ok to use in school or any academic setting. Instead of writing these student off take them on and teach them, its simple.