Your child is able to read words confidently..

Also understands the basic meaning of the text after reading it..

Now, you want to improve their speaking and writing abilities in English, don’t you?

But since you have taught Phonics for Reading and Writing basic spellings of the words ; you’re still wondering how to teach them the context of the English text.

Isn’t this the first question that comes to your mind when you finish teaching Phonics to your child?

But what does it mean to teach Grammar? Do you even know what you’re supposed to be doing?

To form the correct sentence structure?

To write the names in Capitals?

To give correct Punctuation marks?

To say the correct tense of the event that happens?To use the correct plural forms of the words?

What to teach in what order?

How much a 6 year old must know?

Where to start?

What to start with?

How to transition from teaching Phonics to Grammar?

In this post, you’ll understand the 3 simple and easy ways to make the Transition from Phonics to Grammar. But before we dive into that, let’s first understand why we must learn BOTH Phonics and Grammar in order to be successful with the English Language.

What is Phonics all about?Phonics teaches us

• to read the language
• to be able to comprehend what the words or sentences say
• to explicitly understand how to read accurately

Why we need to learn Grammar?

• Helps to understand the language better
• Helps to derive context from the texts we read
• Helps us to understand situations when someone is trying to explain it to us
• Helps us to better explain to others
• Helps us to express our emotions and feelings

Transitioning from Phonics to Grammar explicitly happens at the age of 6/7 i.e. in Grade 1.before that we can teach basics like Prepositions and Articles(more on that in the next post).

So, How to transition from Phonics to Grammar?

1. Teaching Grammar through stories

Everyone loves a story. Stories can be used for both eliciting and illustrating grammar points.

Storytelling is one of these extremely versatile techniques, and once you get the hang of it, it can be a convenient and natural grammar teaching tool.
You may even find that it is the technique that holds students’ attention best, as well as the one they enjoy most. It becomes a convenient and flexible technique for teaching any phase of a grammar lesson.

A story provides a realistic context for presenting grammar points and holds and focuses students’ attention in a way that no other technique can..

2. Teaching grammar through songs and rhymes

Songs

Since the meaning is an important device in teaching grammar, it is important to contextualize any grammar point.

Songs are one of the most enchanting and culturally rich resources that can easily be used in language classrooms.

Songs offer a change from routine (classroom) worksheet-based activities. They are precious resources to develop students abilities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

They can also be used to teach a variety of language items such as sentence patterns, vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm, adjectives, and adverbs.

Learning English through songs also provides a non-threatening atmosphere for students, who usually are tense when speaking English in a formal classroom setting.

Poems

Like songs, poems exaggerate the rhythmic nature of the language. Thus it is an important aspect to be taught, since English is a syllable timed language with stressed syllables being spoken at roughly equal time pauses, even in everyday speech.

Similar to songs, poems have an enormous linguistic value as they provide authenticity and cultural views.

A poem’s capacity to comfort the reader or the listener also increases its effectiveness as a teaching resource.

Once a poem or song has been learned, they stay in the minds of the students for the rest of their lives, with all the rhythms, grammatical features and vocabulary.

Poems may bring the use of creativity and the rhythm into the language classroom, thoughthey may also bring some difficulties.

Poems are not constructed in a simple way and syntactically they are at a higher level than prose, thus it might be very difficult for a foreign language learner to comprehend them completely.

3.Focusing on Active Communication with the child

Active Communication happens only when you actively take part in a conversation with the child.

You ask them questions..
You offer them some help..
You request them to do something..
You promise them they’ll get better..

All of this must happen in English using the correct functions like offer, request, question, greeting, suggesting, describing, apology, reminder, expression of opinion etc.

You improve their Vocabulary by using appropriate words in the context of your conversations.

You help them understand different parts of speech, types of sentences, usage of correct tenses even before formally teaching them any of it.

Active Communication not only helps the child to speak in English Language, but also helps him/her to think in English. It’s a very important trait of learning any new language but is often overlooked.

Now that there’s a shed of whole new light on starting with Grammar with the little ones, you may experience some light bulb or aha moments too!

What are you excited to start with?

Is it the stories? songs or poems? or the Active Communication??