Middle School Grammar: The Ultimate Guide For Teachers

I’m about to do a serious mic drop for  you (that’s still a thing, right?) Teaching grammar doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t. Grammar is often pushed to the wayside or ignored entirely like I did my first year teaching. 

A lot of teachers are often confused about how to teach grammar and how to do it correctly. It’s no shock that a study by the New York Times states, “Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject. ”

This tells me that almost HALF of the teachers don’t have time to prepare for grammar, AND they don’t enjoy teaching it. This breaks my grammar-loving heart because teaching grammar in middle school can be easy, and dare I say, enjoyable.

In this post, you’ll learn how to easily engage students in grammar instruction that stops the eye-rolling, moaning, and groaning. Click to download this free parts of speech lesson. It’s an excellent start for engaging lessons.

How to Teach Grammar (that doesn’t suck) in Middle School?

The number one thing I can say about how to teach grammar in middle school, it needs to be done daily! Like anything else, students and their brains need to be exposed to new things repeatedly. I do not expect my students to remember something after only hearing about it once. 

I use a daily language review to slowly introduce standards and keep them fresh in their brains. Daily language reviews make a great bell ringer, and it allows me to teach grammar daily without sucking up too much time.

Are There Specific Grammar Standards?

Before you jump headfirst into grammar instruction, you need to know your standards. First, you can find the common core language standards. While some states don’t follow the common core standards, most of them are just a different version of the common core language standards. Regardless, find the correct specific standards for your state and grade level. 

After you find the appropriate standards for your state, you may even want to create a scope and sequence for your grammar instruction. A grammar scope and sequence is the order of the standards that you plan to teach. It’s like a loose outline of your grammar instruction mapped for the school year. 

An understanding of the standards can really help you gain depth and clarity in what you need to teach. You might even be surprised to learn that your students need to know more than punctuation, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, verb tense,  and all of the grammar rules that you might be familiar with. Are you picturing your old-school grammar book yet? 

The grammar standards for your middle school students aren’t excessive. Each grade level has less than twenty, and you could easily incorporate all of them into the school year. It just means finding time in your day to do so. 

What Is The Best Order to Teach Grammar?

Examples of topics for your middle grade students might include: sentence structure, participles, comma, independent clauses, dependent clauses, verb tenses, complex sentences, simple subjects, sentence types (compound sentences, complete sentences), direct objects, indirect objects, etc. If that seems like a lot of rules of grammar, don’t worry, and don’t break out the anchor charts just yet!

While some people say you should teach grammar in a specific order, and you should teach certain things first, blah blah blah, don’t overcomplicate it!

Look at the 20 or so standards and decide what you want to teach first. This isn’t math (thankfully); they don’t need a particular skill before the other. If they learn about conjunctions before pronouns, I PROMISE you it’s okay. If you want to get super picky and specific about it, I’m sure you can find somewhere on the web that can make a case for that, but I personally believe it can be easy, and you can incorporate the different grammar skills in whatever order you please.

Consider Various Methods for Grammar Lessons

The big debate in grammar instruction (I bet you didn’t even know there was one) is isolation or teaching grammar in context. So I say how about both? 

In my classroom (we don’t have textbooks), I introduce a new grammar skill to students in isolation.  We have a lesson focused solely on that standard, with no fluff. I’m sure there is a study out there about the attention span of a middle schooler being similar to that of a goldfish, so for that fact, there is no time to waste. We get straight to the meat of it.

After the no fluff lesson, my students will do activities, no drills, based on just that standard. But I will also ask them to incorporate it into their writing and search for it while reading books. So you can teach grammar in both isolation and context without it sucking up your whole day.

How to Make Middle School Grammar Interesting

Doodle Notes- Doodle Notes are a unique visual note taking method with built-in features that increase focus and memory by taking advantage of a collection of brain research, including Dual Coding Theory. I try to include Doodle Notes into just about anything that I am introducing to my middle schoolers. They LOVE them, and Doodle Notes help them retain the information that they are learning. In addition, Doodle Notes are one of the best grammar resources I use in my classroom. Download your free doodle notes for the parts of speech here. 

    Games- Grammar games are a great way to gain student buy-in. Students love playing games, and it shows them that grammar doesn’t suck. The traditional games like BINGO AND Jeopardy are fun, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, you can easily cut a worksheet up, tape it under chairs, and send students on a search. Ask yourself how you can incorporate movement, sound, or competition to amp up student engagement.

Grammar Usage in Real Life!

  I always try to make grammar as real as possible for my students. We laugh about errors I might send to my principal, funny grammatical signs they see, and I offer extra credit for showing me a picture of a grammatical error they see in the real world (aka outside of the school doors.)

    This gets my students excited about grammar concepts, but it also allows them to see the importance. Talk to your students about college, careers, and heck, even social media. Grammar is everywhere. Don’t shy away from explaining that!

So now you see, grammar doesn’t suck. Teaching grammar in middle school can be easy, and your students can enjoy it. 

Now it’s time to kick off your amped up grammar content with this free parts of speech lesson.

Remember, I’m rooting for your friends!

-Alisha-Mrs. A. Riley