Workshop Dates: March 30th, 31st, Apr 1st, 2nd, 8th, 9th, 10th
All Easter Grammar Workshop lessons include discussion of the grammar rule(s), practice exercises, applying the day’s grammar in a one-paragraph writing piece, and proofreading to spot errors in a story.
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Grammar 1:
- Punctuation: This includes identifying when to use a question mark, full stop or exclamation mark, when to capitalise (proper nouns), and how to add commas with conjunctions or initial time words.
- Present Tense: Students will review when we need “-s / -es / -ies” on the end of a regular verb and go over how to use the irregular verbs: “be / is / are,” “have / has” and “can” (which does not change) in present tense.
- Conjunctions: This covers the conjunctions “and, or, so, but, because” to list objects or make sentences longer, along with two conjunctions which can start a sentence: “Since” and “However.”
- Present Continuous: In addition to building sentences like “She is singing…” or “They are playing…,” this includes when to change the spelling (“move – moving” or “dig – digging” patterns).
- Contractions: “Can’t” / “We’re” / “It’s” / They’ll” and more! Students practise using an apostrophe to show letters are missing in these common words, as well as learning not to confuse “its” with “it’s” or “your” with “you’re.”
- Pronouns: The lesson includes putting subject vs. object pronouns in the right place (“They play with them”) and using possessive pronouns (“The toy is hers, and the book is mine.”)
- Apostrophes: After reminding students how to show possession (“Megan’s watch,”) we will use pictures to illustrate the trickier plural noun situations (“The three crocodiles’ tails…” but “the children’s feet”).
Grammar 2:
- Past Tense: Students will go over the rules for regular verbs: when to add “-ed,” when to double the consonant (“stopped,”) and when to add “-ied” (“fried” yet “enjoyed”). They will also practise with some irregulars (“woke, ran”), patterns for forming negatives (“I did not run…”) and questions (“Did you run?”) in past tense.
- Adjectives & Adverbs: This covers identifying adjectives, the differences between “-ed” and “-ing” adjectives (“bored” vs. “boring”), what adverbs do and how to construct them with “-ly” or “-ily.”
- Prepositions: Pictures help illustrate prepositions of place (e.g.: in, above, between) and prepositions of direction (along, through, over). Then, students will discover the rules for prepositions of time; why it’s “on Saturday” but “in April.”
- Present & Present Continuous Tenses: These useful tenses for facts and descriptions will be reviewed and practised, including rules for “-s/-es/-ies” at the end of a verb (“he reads,” “she catches,” “the bird flies”), the irregular verbs “be” and “have,” how to construct present continuous tense (“The cat is climbing”) and why some verbs cannot be used for it.
- Conjunctions: This focuses on correctly using “and/or/so/but/because” to extend sentences, with a brief introduction to the rarer ones such as “yet” or “although.”
- Future Tenses: Students learn how to answer questions such as “What will happen next?” or “What are they going to do?” and express future responsibilities.
- Past Continuous: This covers past continuous sentences in the positive (“We were riding the tram,”) negative (“He was not talking”) and question forms (“Were the pandas eating?”) along with when to use past simple for the shorter action that interrupted a continuous action.
- Grammar 3:
- Verbs and Simple Tenses: This reviews the rules for regular past simple tense and practises some of the common errors among irregular verbs. Then, it moves on to present simple (which is useful for non-fiction writing) and subject-verb agreement.
- Adjectives, Comparatives and Superlatives: Beyond identifying and adding adjectives, students will learn to correctly compare using “-er than,” “-est,” or “more… than” and “the most.”
- Nouns (Plural & Uncountable): Nouns might appear easy, but plurals (butterfly – butterflies, child – children), proper noun capitalisation, and identifying uncountable nouns (“bread is…” vs. “slices of bread are…”) cause frequent errors needing correction!
- Past Perfect & Present Perfect Tenses: Students learn how to use “have,” “have been” and “had” with the past participle (“taken, grown”) to make sentences about past events, ongoing actions and duration.
- Proofreading: This is designed to strengthen students’ proofreading skills by specifying what to look for, including idea flow, punctuation and verb tense.
- Commas & Comma Splices: After a reminder about some different ways commas should be used, including for initial time phrases, this covers how to spot the sentence-structure mistake called a “comma splice” and how to fix it with a conjunction.
- Adverbs: Identifying adverbs when they are describing verbs, adjectives or even other adverbs, then correctly constructing adverbs from other words will all be addressed in this lesson.