Grass Skirts: Great for Practice Stage Grammaring

So you want to do some grammar practice. Maybe you’re drilling subject-verb agreement with present continuous sentences, and you want to give your students a list of prompts to grammar into correctly formed sentences. You might give them a list of prompts that look something like this:

he / eat / chicken

…and of course, you’re looking for them to write ‘He is eating chicken.’ But, there are problems. Grammar is boring. Give your students ten of these on a worksheet and the room quickly becomes quiet and dry. Worse – by the time a student whose understanding is less than complete has finished six or seven answers, writing ‘he is eats chicken’, the mistake has already been repeated six or seven times.

Grass skirts deal with all of these problems. It’s very simple. Rather than handing out worksheets, turn them into grass skirts. In other words, turn them into slips of paper for students to rip off one at a time, like this:

Grass skirts, pinned on the wall.

Students grammaring, in this case using passive voice.

Pin them on the wall around the room, allocate one set to each student or pair of students, if you want some collaboration. Students stand up, rip off a strip of paper, return to their desk and complete a sentence. They then bring the sentence to you for checking. This allows you to instantly give feedback. Either ‘yes, great, get the next one’. Or, ‘No, try again, think more about the verb “eat”‘.

And this is where grass skirts are really powerful – in the instant formative assessment and instant error correction it allows you to provide. An incorrect student goes away having been given quick advice on what needs fixing, corrects misunderstandings, returns to you again with the corrected sentence, and then has the chance to use their new understanding on their next strip of paper.

Students love this activity. It becomes a race as students try and complete the sentences as quickly as possible. It’s energetic, students are out of their seats moving around the room. The students seem to get a kick out of ripping off the strips of paper. Best of all, it gives you the chance to instantly feedback on errors and if there are very common errors across your class, then to immediately go back and re-teach whatever needs further focus. It’s really an AfL goldmine!

I’ve used this activity over and over again in class to drill grammar structures in a controlled way. Give it a try and let me know how you get on!