1. An Overview of Grammatical Building Blocks

Think about how we teach students to read …  

We start by helping them connect sounds to the letters that represent them. This foundation is extremely important! It allows students to blend sounds together to read words — and break them apart to spell. Once students know all the sound-letter correspondences, they have unlocked the power to read an unlimited number of words!

Take these letters, for example:

These five letters can be used to make the two words below:
 

Although these words share the same letters, their arrangement forms different words with different meanings. The order of the letters matters! 

The same idea applies to sentence structure, also known as syntax. Just like there are a limited number of sound-letter correspondences, there are also a limited number of grammatical building blocks that make up sentences. When students learn that words can be categorized into building blocks — through clear, explicit instruction — they gain the tools to understand and create an endless number of sentences.

Now let’s use these words...
 

to build these sentences …
 

These sentences use the same words, but their arrangement, or sentence structure, builds a different meaning. The first sentence tells us that the birds see the cats and will be cautious around these predators. The second sentence tells us that the cats are watching the birds, possibly to pounce.  While both sentences use the same words, the meaning being conveyed is different. Who or what each sentence is about changes. The order of the words, and their relationships to one another, matters!

Just as you teach sound-letter correspondences, you need to teach the grammatical building blocks that can be used to create sentences. 

Words can be categorized into eight grammatical building blocks: 

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Adverbs
• Adjectives
• Prepositions
• Pronouns
• Conjunctions
• Interjections

We use these to organize our thoughts as we speak, listen, read, and write. Treating words as building blocks helps you see how they function within a sentence. And this helps our students better connect to how words work (the jobs they do) and how that affects their meaning. 

For this reason, here at Reading Universe, when we introduce a grammatical building block to our students, such as a noun, we take a “function first, label later” approach. 

For example, imagine you are teaching the -ck spelling rule and you read this sentence to your students:

The truck went fast.

Ask your students, 

Who or what is this sentence about?

Students say, 

The truck.

You might reply, 

That’s right! The who or the what is the truck.

As you’ll see later in this skill explainer, we refer to nouns as the who or the what. This helps us focus on the function of the word “truck” … the role of the word in the sentence … before we label it as a noun. 

Click to the next page to learn how to explicitly teach nouns. Soon, we will publish modules on how to teach all eight of the grammatical building blocks!