Daily Language and Grammar for First Grade

For the past 5 years that I've been teaching first grade, I struggled to cover the grammar and language standards. At the beginning of the year, I'd teach that nouns are a person, place, thing, or animal. Students could grasp this pretty well. Then after a couple of months I would teach verbs. Most of the kids could tell the difference between a noun and a verb in a list of words. Then when spring came around, I started teaching adjectives and that is when everything started falling apart. No matter how many times I taught it, they just couldn't differentiate nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

So then I reread the language standards. Nowhere in the first grade standards does it say they should identify them. It says they should USE them. That was my lightbulb moment.

I needed to incorporate teaching the language and grammar skills into my reading and writing instruction. So that is where this resource began. I went through all the standards and put them in an order of difficulty and then made pages that covered all of these skills within reading and writing. I decided that the best way to cover all the skills was to do a daily half sheet. It doesn't take a lot of time, but the skills are reinforced over and over.

At the beginning of each week, I give students a new booklet with the weeks' pages. Each day we do one page and at the end of the week, they take them home. The kids like it because it has kid-friendly language and I like it because they are engaged and it doesn't take a lot of time. Most of all, they are finally learning those language and grammar skills - the ones in the standards that is!

There are 4 units, one for each quarter of the school year. For each page you have a page to project and a page for the students to follow along. The projection page also has a key so you can check your work. Or if you have the students do it independently, you can put it up for them to check their own work.