2. How to Teach the Eight Grammatical Building Blocks

At Reading Universe, we use an evidence-based approach popularly known as structured literacy. Structured literacy is a way of organizing and delivering reading instruction to ensure students get all the skills they need in an efficient timeframe — and without any gaps. With this approach, teachers use explicit or direct instruction. 

Just like you teach sound letter correspondences for phonics you will teach the grammatical building blocks to teach building sentences. This allows for an intentional, systematic plan that integrates both grammar and syntax. An example of a scope and sequence of how grammar and syntax interacts is coming soon.

Function First, Label Later
As described in the Overview of this skill explainer, 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, when we introduce a grammatical building block to our students, such as a noun, we take a "function first, label later" approach.

For example, teaching who or what and did what gives you the essential components for a simple sentence. Simply teaching the part of speech of a word has shown to not be effective for supporting reading comprehension and writing. 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.

In this How to Teach section, we'll show you how to use the function first approach to explicitly teach: 

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Adverbs
• Adjectives (coming soon)
• Prepositions (coming soon)
• Pronouns (coming soon)
• Conjunctions (coming soon)
• Interjections (coming soon)

Throughout each of the explicitly teach sections you will see example sentences about cacti and plants that model how you can use content area topics and read alouds for grammar instruction. By doing this, you will allow students to use the knowledge that they are gaining through science and social studies topics and apply it in reading and writing. For these lessons we selected the text Cactus Hotel by Brenda Z. Guiberson to accompany a science unit on plants. By using sentences from a read aloud or based on a content area we are able to lessen the cognitive load for students. It levels the playing field because the students have the background knowledge we have already been working to build about this topic, allowing students to focus on the grammar tasks. As you plan your grammar instruction and weave it into your phonics lessons or content area instruction consider which topics or read alouds you might use.