Grammar Remediated
Purpose of Exercise: Teaching grammar rules to your students can be painstakingly boring—not only for them, but for you. Covering this material, however, serves a valuable function in the writing classroom. This exercise is designed to give your students the chance to engage with grammar rules in a multimodal environment as opposed to rote memorization.
Description: Students will use either computers or a visual medium of your choice (perhaps panels for a comic) to illustrate a grammar rule. Bringing in either suggested topics (based on issues you’re seeing in your students’ writing) or allowing students to choose their own can work for this exercise. Learning grammar rules is entirely different than learning to use them, and this exercise puts your students in a position where they must investigate a grammar rule, consider how to represent it, and evaluate visual and written components to create a cohesive whole which illustrates how a grammar rule works.
Suggested Time: Class period
Procedure: It’s best to begin with examples of multimodal illustrations of grammar rules. The material from The Oatmeal shows how grammar rules don’t need to be dry and boring, and encourage a playful, thoughtful approach to the exercise. From here, tell them to select grammar rules, or provide them with a list of potential ones, and have them begin investigating these rules via either the McGraw Hill Handbook or Purdue Owl. If you are in a computer classroom, there are several resources at your disposal. Using mediums students are familiar with and will likely enjoy working with (such as Grammar Memes by using Meme Generator or Grammar Demotivational Posters by using website generators as well) will help keep them engaged and usually yields great results. You can also encourage them to combine their materials in other ways, like organizing Grammar Memes into a Prezi, or Powerpoint. If you are not in a computer classroom, you can either bring in comic templates and encourage them to design comic panels, or have them combine images and words in another fashion.
Additional Information: This activity can be done with students submitting results individually, or in groups which then present their finished work at the end of class to their peers, depending on time and resources at your disposal.