Teacher Discussion Forums

How to let elementary kids learn grammar? They try once, like what I Did to the older kids, but they all say they don't understand. And they are completely confused, but I don't know why? Should they learn grammar now(form 4/5/6), and how do I teach them about grammar/ a sentence pattern?
Could anyone give me some advice, please?

Formal study of grammar is not going to work with little kids. With little kids you can talk about things, people, actions, and how to describe things. If they understand the differences between certain words, they will be able to easily understand what nouns (people, things), verbs (actions), adjectives (how you describe things), and the rest of the parts of speach when they get to that point later on. For creating sentences, you need someone or something, and action, and maybe describing what person or thing.

One idea is to have the parts of speech in different colours. You can make flash cards of words and have coloured chalk for writing on the board. They need a green word which might be a verb and a red word which might be a noun to put together to make a thought and then they can add blue adjectives and pink adverbs, white articles and yellow prepositions. I try to keep the noun groups in the same colour range, the verb groups in the same colour range so they know they go together. They can use coloured pencils to outline their words at the beginning or even write the words. They can put up a word wall with all the red words in one column and the green words in another. They will soon notice that the green words can be further categorized into action and state of being and might even notice that there are saying verbs, hearing verbs, and so on. Nouns or red words can be categorized into names, places, ideas and so on. They can see which red and green words can go together and make sense. They can count how many times they use a particular green word to see which verbs are more popular (usually what we call irregular verbs) and try to figure out why this is so and how they got changed so drastically from the basic pattern. You can use various shades of red to show the pattern of a regular verb. You can show them how English questions work by changing the position of the coloured words and so on. Kids love language as much as they love science, music and art if you are excited about language.