What And How To Teach Grammar?

How do you teach grammar to an English 10 class?

• I asked my english teacher for extra credit and she told me that i have to come up with a lesson for my class... i have NO IDEA how to teach grammar! she gave me book called Language Network by McDougal Littell to get the lesson from. she said to read chapter one section one thats about "The Parts of Speech." someone please help!

• Answer:

  Parts of speech--how to make it live? Noun -- Pretty obvious, have class members think of some while you list them on the board (or choose an assistant to list them) and divide them into common and proper. Pronouns -- Not so obvious, but come up with some correct and incorrect sentences, where it's not obvious what is right. Its vs It's (possessive pronoun versus a contracted version of "it is". Who versus Whom is also instructive. Verbs -- transitive versus intransitive--get the class to make two sentences of each after you give some examples. Adverbs -- SHOW people how even journalists hack up the English language with soup like this: Hopefully, the circumstances will permit the lifting of the restriction soon. Fortunately, I had my hatchet. A _correct_ use of hopefully would be like this: "The boy stared into the window of the toy store hopefully." The other usage is an avoidance of responsibility and should be like "I hope to lift the restriction soon." The Fortunately isn't really wrong but is poorly written and could be better with "I was fortunate to have my hatchet." Prepositions--Yeah, they take objects like "whom", but how do we use them? 1. Pick up an eraser. 2. Say, "I drop the eraser onto the desk." and drop the eraser so it falls onto the desk. 2.5. Pick up the eraser. 3. Climb up on the desk (best if you are wearing slacks). 4. Say, "I drop the eraser on the desk," and drop the eraser (it doesn't matter where it lands, you were on the desk when you dropped it). 5. Get off the desk. 6. Remind everyone that when they go to the rest room that it is uncool to throw paper towels in the sink, because climbing into the sink to throw paper towels around just looks foolish besides being dangerous. Mention that it is probably uncool to throw paper towels into the wash basins as well. If the teacher hasn't used the stage hook yet to yank you off of your presentation, ask for more time on another day for the other parts of speech, which are really more boring (adjectives). If you are a math whiz, you might use a few algebra word problems and diagram the sentences and map the sentence diagrams to equations.