Why Another Grammar Workbook?

I looked up the words "grammar workbook" on Amazon, and I got over 10,000 hits. That's a lot of grammar workbooks! I had no idea there were so many, especially in an age of worksheets off the internet. So why did I feel the need to write another grammar workbook myself? And why did I drag Marie Foley into the process? 

I'm still asking myself both questions nearly daily, mostly because we've already moved onto the next book, and as it turns out, writing workbooks is a lot of… er… work. In reality, though, I know why I decided to do this and why Marie said yes, even if I forget from time to time when the sheer breadth and depth of the task feels weighty or the technology doesn't feel like cooperating that day. (I'm looking at you, Canva.) 

Marie first came to me to discuss grammar and asked me to teach her "how to move stuff around in sentences and maybe how to use commas." Well, what's more movable than a prepositional phrase? So we started with those, explored the grammatical functions they could perform for us, and the knowledge was so transformative that Marie realized not only that she could understand grammar but that she could use that understanding to write beautiful sentences. 

But why another grammar workbook? Aren't there enough of those? 

The reasons for another book are sitting just above my keyboard and smiling or sighing or giggling in my Zoom room. They're sitting across a table from me in my happy, colorful literacy intervention classroom at school. 

It's the twelfth-grader who told me he'd been expected to write papers and essays throughout his school career but had not been taught explicitly and concretely what a sentence actually is. 

It's the sixth-grader who had so much trauma around school and writing that she felt a rush of emotion whenever she was asked to write but who asked for more when she saw that she was given agency and clarity in what to write down. 

The reason for another book is the students who have benefited from learning the grammatical functions of the phrases and clauses we use to understand and write sentences. 

There is no magic bullet for teaching writing or grammar. There are snake oil salespeople, but they're usually found out when their products "just don't work for my students." There is no one approach that works for every student. You must teach the kid in front of you. But there are ways to lighten the cognitive load of the grammar and syntax cog in the writing machine, and I haven't experienced it to be more worksheets that beckon kiddos to underline nouns and put a box around verbs, circle the participial phrases and underline the participial. Those exercises never transferred to my students' writing, and I wonder if they've transferred to yours? 

I'm not against labeling the grammatical forms. We can't talk about things very well if those things don't have names. I just think those forms are more effectively discussed when we do so in relation to the grammatical functions they perform. It's more important to me that a kiddo knows how to use a word than it is if they can tell me what part of speech it can sometimes be in some sentences. 

Marie and I have seen kids' attitudes change around writing when they work through the functions like Subject and Predicate and choose which Modifiers and Adverbials they want to include. 

Side story: One kiddo was so excited to write about Pokémon that he added Modifiers and Adverbials without me asking and was able to tell me what each of the phrases was doing! 

So he started with:

Mega Lucario helped save the world.

And we ended with:

Shiny Mega Lucario Z, who has blue fur, helped save the world by defeating a powerful Pokémon.

I'm also proud of his sentence, "The small cat with pink paw pads is comfortably sleeping on a rug."

Isn't that beautiful? 

I think it is, but that's not what matters. What matters is that he does. He found his ability to understand grammatical functions, and it changed his writing. 

So I wrote a workbook with Marie. We think it's pretty good. We hope you do, too, but our real hope is that your students will.