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How is grammar being taught in schools?

What's going on grammatically in your child's classroom

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Originally published in Today's Parent November 2011

Toronto writer and self-confessed “grammar nut” Gabrielle Bauer admits it made her crazy when her son Jackson, now 13, began bringing home written work from school with unchecked grammatical errors. “It was as if the teacher had been instructed to correct only one or two mistakes and ignore the rest,” she says.

Bauer, a mother of two, was so concerned that she began to hold a series of writing and grammar workshops in her kids’ classrooms. “None of my kids’ teachers have taught grammar systematically,” she complains. “Even the basics like your and you’re aren’t being taught. Kids in grade nine are making these mistakes.”

In fact, grammar is being taught in our schools, says Bernadette Kolonel, a grade-five teacher at Hazelwood Elementary in St. John’s. While there may be some style differences from teacher to teacher and from province to province, today’s approach attempts to walk the line between “beating the death out of adverbs” and ignoring grammar altogether.

Shelley Stagg Peterson, a former Alberta elementary school teacher and associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says the emphasis is on editing children’s work and offering mini-lessons aimed at addressing common grammatical mistakes.

What this means in practice, explains Kolonel, is students are asked to write about a subject, and teachers then “discuss how to enhance that writing, in terms of ideas and grammar.” If several students make a similar mistake (say, using apostrophes incorrectly), she designs a short lesson on the subject. Or she removes the punctuation and paragraphing from the work of a children’s author and asks the students to replace them. “The idea is that grammar has a purpose and it’s about communication,” Kolonel says. “It makes it more meaningful if you teach it in the context of writing.”

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