10 Picture Books to Teach Grammar in Secondary ELA via Secondary Sara

10 Picture Books to Teach Grammar in Secondary ELA

Secondary Sara: 10.20.2018

Many middle and high school English teachers are either reluctant to use picture books at all in their classrooms, OR they are interested but don’t know where to start.

Grammar in particular is a great opportunity to include picture books, which can add color, imagery, and rhyming to enhance memory of rules. One way to get started would be to put these books around the room and let students rotate to them, taking notes on grammar rules or observations they take from each one!

Chatting with me today is Christina Hanson, a picture book guru who blogs at Hanson Hallway (and who does the #ClassroomBookaDay routine with her middle schoolers)!

#1.  Twenty-Odd Ducks
Sara: I love Twenty-Odd Ducks as a memorable way to teach hyphens and other punctuation marks (which is SO helpful if you’re a middle school teacher in particular, since some of the “fun” punctuation marks are in our Common Core standards).

#2: Alfie the Apostrophe
Christina: In Alfie the Apostrophe, Alfie wants to enter the annual punctuation-mark talent show to show off his contraction and possessive-making skills, but he is very nervous.

#3: The Perfect Punctuation Book
Sara: The Perfect Punctuation Book is a pop-up book, and it's basically a premade Interactive Notebook for punctuation!

#4: Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What is an Adjective?
Christina: Hairy, Scary, Ordinary is one of 27 books in the Words Are CATegorical series by Brian P. Cleary.  It starts out with the definition of adjective, and follows with many, many examples of adjectives.

#5: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Sara: You might know the grown-up style guide of the same name, but the picture book version of Eats, Shoots & Leaves is similar to Twenty-Odd Ducks in that it shows the power of changing punctuation marks.  READ MORE >>