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:

Taken altogether, 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 cats are watching the birds, possibly to pounce. The second sentence tells us that the birds see the cats and may be cautious around these predators.

While both sentences use the same words, they convey a different meaning. Who or what each sentence is about changes. The order of the words, and their relationship to one another, matters!

All languages have an expected, predictable structure that helps readers anticipate what comes next. When an unexpected order occurs, the reader often spends more time trying to understand what they just read. For example, if a student reads, 

Dog bites man.

they understand that is something that could possibly happen. These words not only bring meaning, but they also represent the organization of that meaning … who did what to whom. If they read, 

Man bites dog. 

although it fits the predictable order of sentence structure (subject, verb, object), the meaning is unexpected and takes extra effort to interpret.

Just as you teach sound-letter correspondences, you need to teach the grammatical building blocks that can be used to create sentences and the order that they typically appear in. 

Words can be categorized into eight grammatical building blocks (what you probably know as parts of speech): 

We use these to organize our thoughts as we speak, listen, read, and write.

Later on in this skill explainer we'll show you how to explicitly teach each of these building blocks:

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

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. 

Teaching the job or function a word has in a sentence supports reading comprehension and writing (Hennessy, 2021). Students need to be able to apply what they are learning about the grammatical building blocks in context, just like they do with developing their decoding skills.

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. 

Imagine a teacher wants their students to identify the subject of this sentence: "The truck went fast." Here's what that might look like with a function-first approach: 

The teacher would read the sentence to their students:

The truck went fast.

Then they'd ask the students, 

Who or what is this sentence about?

The students say, 

The truck.

The teacher would reply, 

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

Instead of asking students to identify the noun (or what the subject of the sentence is) they start with a question: 

Who or what is this sentence about? 

This helps the students focus on the function of the word truck — the role of the word in the sentence — before they label truck as a noun.

Take a look as reading specialist Lisa Glickman talks her Atlanta first graders through the functions of the words hoist, boy, and point (and notice that it's in the middle of her phonics lesson!).

The function-first approach may feel different to some of you. Eventually we do teach students the term noun. Toward the end of your lesson introducing nouns — the who or the what — you might tell your students that the who or the what can be called a noun. 

But calling it a noun doesn't help students make meaning. Discussing the who or the what does. 

We want students to think about the function, or job, a word has in a sentence. This is a learning process! As students are able to automatically identify the function a word plays in a sentence, then we can remove the scaffolding labels of the who or the what to allow them to make meaning on their own.