2. When to Teach Grammatical Building Blocks

To get the most out of grammar instruction, students should first have the following language skills:

• The understanding that individual words carry meaning
  Words can represent people, places, actions, attributes, and more. When you engage students in conversation, their expressive vocabulary will demonstrate this understanding.
• Phonological awareness, especially word awareness
  This is the understanding that sentences are made up of individual words. Students who can count the number of words in a short, spoken sentence are better prepared to discuss the function of individual words.

Most kindergartners will meet these prerequisites.

The sequence below reflects when we recommend you introduce the eight grammatical building blocks. But remember: effective instruction is cumulative, with ongoing review and refinement across grade levels. Depending on your students, you may want to make adjustments to this sequence.

Prepositions: Introduce in second grade or third grade
We often introduce prepositions after students have a strong foundation in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. And that’s typically second or third grade. Of course, even kindergartners will have already learned the function of some prepositions by that point … in the box, on the box, under the box. Second or third grade will be when you teach the building block explicitly and eventually give it a label.

Pronouns: Introduce in second grade
Because students must first understand what a noun is before they can replace it with a pronoun, personal pronoun instruction is often most successful beginning in second grade, after they've developed a solid understanding of nouns and sentence structure. (But teachers will also be talking to kindergartners and first graders about he, she, and it … and third graders will need help with complex pronoun use.)

Conjunctions: Introduce in first grade and add complexity in second and third
As students become comfortable adding adjectives to nouns (sticky mud), they are ready to learn conjunctions, typically beginning in first grade with and, but, or, and so. Conjunctions connect words, phrases, and sentences, allowing students to combine ideas and write more sophisticated sentences. You'll see their skills improve through second and third grade. Later, students learn to add subordinating conjunctions like because, when, after, and although, usually in third or fourth grade. 

Interjections: Introduce in second or third grade
Interjections are also introduced later, beginning in second or third grade, because they occur less frequently in formal writing and are generally easier for students to understand once they have a solid grasp of the other parts of speech. Although they can add emotion and emphasis to writing (Wow!), interjections play a smaller role in sentence construction than the other grammatical building blocks. 

Remember that grammar instruction is most effective when it is taught in service of comprehension and composition, helping students understand how words work together to form meaningful sentences and how sentences connect to create meaning across texts. For example, when you introduce understanding simple sentences, your students would learn that simple sentences can be made up of a noun (what we'll call a who or what) and a verb (what we'll call a did what).