Transitional Vocabulary – one process of effectively teaching grammar.

I realise there are times when I might show a little bias however I had to show this photo of a teacher at my school teaching grammar in ways that both engage and support students transferring the understanding to their writing.

The teacher, Kalliopi, had just shown a short YouTube clip on using transitional vocabulary in sentences. I was there when she paused the clip to ask students to connect their earlier learning around dependent and independent clauses to the work – they continued on taking notes. At the end of the short clip she then proceeded to draft an anchor chart with students who used their notes to explain the meaning and context of the work.

At some point a student explained the context of a word which got lots of student nods – she then asked the student to repeat that explanation being filmed (on an i-pad) that would later be added to the Google Classroom. The class was actively building its own bank of teaching and learning resources.

The students later in the day were then set a task (on google classroom) where they had a write a short piece (this afternoon’s was on connections between Asia and Australia) at the same time demonstrating research skills and using transitional words learnt that morning (underlining them as they went). This was an immediate guided practice opportunity for students and set the expectation that they need to learn this work to effectively write a short explanatory text.