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 cats are watching the birds, possibly to pounce. The second sentence tells us that the birds see the cats and will be cautious around these predators. 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 relationship to one another, matters!

All languages have an expected, predictable order 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 as something that could possibly happen. These words not only bring meaning, but they also represent structure. If they read, "Man bites dog," although it fits the predictable order of sentence structure, the meaning does not make sense.

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.

When You Teach the Building Blocks: Function First, Label Later

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:

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."

Sometimes a word can serve two different functions, depending upon the context of the sentence where you find it. For example, we know the word wave can be either a noun or a verb. And it can answer either of these different function questions:

• "What?" — an ocean wave
• "Did what?" — wave hello to a friend

The meaning of a word can change based on its function in the sentence. By talking about this we help students to deepen their understanding of words and their meanings. And it helps students develop as readers and writers.

Eventually we do teach students the terms noun and verb. You might tell your students that the who or the what can be called a noun and the did what is a verb. But calling it a noun or a verb doesn't help students make meaning. Discussing who or what or did 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 scaffold to allow them to make meaning on their own. 

These first two building blocks — nouns and verbs — are essential because they are the required components of a sentence. This makes them foundational to sentence-level comprehension.

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.