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(More customer reviews)In MECHANICALLY INCLINED, Jeff Anderson tackles the issue of grammarphobia and edit-phobia head on. You know the diseases. They are endemic in English classrooms everywhere.
Anderson advocates using "mentor" sentences and paragraphs taken from books that interest students. He also details how to set up a writer's notebook where kids can write freely without fear of the Red Pen (which, to them, is like an invader from the Red Planet, as narrated by Orson Welles). The notebook includes sections for creativity, exploration, modeling, and copying well-written sentences and paragraphs.
I especially like Anderson's idea for the Editing Checkout, where students "scan" work looking for specific skills, then create a "receipt" of their findings. NATIONAL ENQUIRERS are not necessary for this activity. The kids will get a kick out of it and (not too loud, now) will learn something about editing (with one pen, two pens, red pens, or blue pens) while they're at it. What more could a teacher ask for? (OK, don't answer that...)
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Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's WorkshopSome teachers love grammar and some hate it, but nearly all struggle to find ways of making the mechanics of English meaningful to kids. As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, "I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything," so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop.
Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the "high payoff," or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:
short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;
using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;
visual scaffolds, including wall charts, and visual cues that can be pasted into writer's notebooks;
regular, short routines, like "express-lane edits," that help students spot and correct errors automatically.
Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.
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