Oh my goodness…how boring does this post sound?  (I won’t feel bad if you don’t continue reading this post if you are not a language arts teacher!)

Honestly, I really struggle with the whole teaching of Grammar/Language in isolation. It is hard for me to understand why anyone needs to know WHAT a predicate nominative is or the difference between a clause or phrase. I think we just need to know how to speak, how to write, and how to make our speaking and writing better.

Without debating it any further, my 7th grade inclusion class recently had to learn the helping and linking verbs.  Most of them had already memorized the helping verbs in 6th grade.  It seemed like an easy A, but memorizing a list of seemingly random words was not as simple as it sounds for some of my students.

Here are the study tools we used:

This was the way it was presented in class. This representation makes sense for some learners, but not all.

In case they forgot the helping verbs from last year….

Just the linking verbs

This is what worked for the majority of the students in my study hall when it came time to just do the linking verbs. I encouraged them to write these letters on their papers right away when they got the quiz.

PDF versions of all four:

• Linking Verb Clues
• Helping verbs
• Venn Diagram Linking Vs. Helping
• Linking Verb Clues