En Key Stage
English Tests
2 Levels
3-5
Making the SPaG Test a Little More Fun Name Like many 30-somethings who passed through primary school in the 1980s, lessons on grammar were noticeable missing from my early education. Tense was something you felt before tucking in to the school dinner meat loaf and the only clause I knew about was the one that visited at Christmas. My first real introduction to grammar was through secondary MFL lessons. Things have changed a great deal in the intervening years, and now grammar, along with spelling and punctuation, is taking centre stage in the form of the Key Stage Two SPaG test. I think that giving these three areas need 'some' prominence along with treasuring the creative, imaginative magic that flows through children's writing, but this new obsession with grammar and the creation of the SPaG test for primary children is something altogether different. To bring some fun and, dare I say it, enjoyment into the grammar learning process I have drawn upon the EAL skills and games I used while teaching English to non-native speakers and some of my techie enthusiasm. This is for my own sanity as much as the children’s. While spelling and punctuation are also important, I will be focusing on making grammar more engaging.
Martin Burrett Smuggler As most primary school teachers will tell you, children learn better when participating in games. The first activity I would like to introduce I like to call ‘smuggler’. This can be played as a whole class, but there are better levels of pupil participation if it is played in small groups. The children are given some grammatically incorrect phrases. One child must talk on a topic and smuggle as many mistakes past the other members of the group to gain points, while the ‘listeners’ must spot them. Any false-positives give an additional point to the smuggler. I have also tried this with short passages of prepared text where I try to smuggle mistakes past the class, but it is much more fun when the children are involved. Toss the Hoop ... or your soft object of choice. Set up 4 coloured cones or areas to throw into and assign a word class to each cone/ area. For each ‘hit’ the children are given a word from a pile of, verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs, depending on the colour. The team then must build a sentence with those words and they can add other words on a limited number of whiteboards. The trick is to keep the words fresh so the children are constantly making new patterns. A twist