Teaching Grammar in Fifth Grade to Boost Comprehension

Grammar, the bane of every elementary student’s existence. Teaching grammar in fifth grade can be a challenge. It is often a topic that is skipped over or only discussed when publishing a piece of writing in the classroom.

Teaching grammar in fifth grade and in upper elementary can help students not only become better communicators, get a better score on their writing, but helps to improve reading comprehension, vocabulary and language skills.

With the right resources and supports, teachers can successfully teach grammar in fifth grade!

Reading Comprehension and Teaching Grammar in Fifth Grade

Students that struggle with comprehension most likely struggle with these areas of literacy (in this specific order)-

Decoding- If a student is unable to decode the words they are reading, they will not understand the text. Check out my posts about teaching phonics, syllables, (including Schwa) Prefixes & Suffixes, and Greek and Latin Roots. If you are looking for a quick way to individually assess which students struggle with decoding, check out Cunningham’s Names Test. This test is a quick way to get kids to read a variety of first and last names that contain various elements of phonics. Thank you very much Bernard Pendergraph, Cindy Sampson and Dee Skidmore (to name a few names from the test). The score sheet is a great way to break down a student’s strengths and weaknesses in phonics. There is also an Early Names Test.
Vocabulary- Reading comprehension is affected if students do not understand the meaning of most words in a text and are unable to gain the overall meaning of that text. When students have a strong vocabulary they are able to decode words, make connections through the text and understand multiple meaning words.
Comprehension of Language (Linguistic Comprehension)- Once a student is able to decode words and have a strong understanding of the meanings of the words they are reading, the other area that can affect their comprehension is the language of what they are reading. Language comprehension is the ability to put everything together in a text including the grammar and syntax of the message.

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For students who struggle with reading it is important to assess the specific area of challenge. If you are able to assess that they are able to successfully decode a text and know the vocabulary throughout the passage, and the student still struggles to understand the author’s’ message, it is helpful to look at and support the language of literacy by explicitly teaching the structure of the passage.

Students who struggle with linguistic comprehension, but seem to have strong decoding and vocabulary skills might struggle with executive functioning (due to weak working memory and cognitive flexibility) . Check out Kelly Cartwright’s book Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension to learn more.

Pronouns and Reading Comprehension- Teaching Grammar in Fifth Grade

Explicitly teach pronoun usage by letting students know that authors use pronouns as a shorthand for character’s names and other objects in a text.

Teach students to visually track characters and their pronouns by:

Make a copy of a sample text for students to highlight. Harry Potter is a perfect example for the rich text and many characters that are written about in a given paragraph.
Have students use multiple colors to track characters- highlighters, markers, crayons or colored pencils. Use one color per character in the sample text.
Assign a color to each character- Harry Potter is highlighted in yellow, Ron in purple, Hermione in blue etc.
Read the paragraph/sample prior to highlighting.
Mark up the text by highlight each time the author uses the characters name, nickname or pronoun.
Reread the paragraph and discuss.

Helpful pronoun video resources include:

What is a pronoun? (Khan Academy)
Personal Pronouns (Khan Academy)
Possessive Pronouns– My/Mine, Your/Yours etc. (Khan Academy)
What are Possessive Pronouns (American English- Start at 1:30 for possessive pronoun practice)
Indefinite Pronouns– Generic replacement of nouns like anyone, something, nobody etc. (Khan Academy)
How to Learn Indefinite Pronouns (American English)
Reflexive Pronouns (Khan Academy)
What are Reflexive Pronouns (American English)
Emma’s Pronoun Trick (English With Emma)- Skip to 3 minute mark for pronoun & comprehension trick. The first few minutes of the video are pronoun review.

I have quite a few Khan Academy (You know, the math website) videos listed. They have accumulated quite a great archive of grammar videos. David is the grammar guy over at Khan academy. My students love him! He breaks down grammatical informational into less overwhelming concepts with fun visuals. As David shares in all of his videos, You can learn anything. David out!

Comparatives, Intensifiers and Adverbs of Degree- Teaching Grammar in Fifth Grade

Adjectives are words that describes something (hot, large, bumpy). Comparatives are adjectives that compare. Whereas intensifiers will amplify the meaning of the message by adding emotional context and emphasis.

This type of grammatical background really helps reinforce a student’s comprehension as they read as this provides the structural basis of meaning and deepens the visualization and inferences the reader makes as they read the text.

Comparatives- Monsters Learn English– This video is the perfect intro to students who have not had much formal grammar instruction. It has been well received in my class of 5th graders. The students loved the dopey monster who kept on trying to use the word banana as a comparison. This is a great intro level video for students and would make a nice review as well.

Intro to Comparatives: Khan Academy– You will be lucky to meet three penguins in this video- Raul, Cesar and Gabriela, all three who are comparing their body temperature.

Intensifiers and Adverbs of Degree: Khan Academy

Prepositions and Reading Comprehension- Teaching Grammar in Fifth Grade

Prepositions are (mostly) words that indicate position- direction, location, time (beside, between, before). “Of” is a trickier preposition as it introduces an object, “a bowl of popcorn.”

If students struggle with executive functioning skills or attending to the text, they might miss out on these little words that indicate the location, time or direction of something when reading or listening to a text or speaker. Calling attention to these functional words will help strengthen a student’s understanding of the message.

Helpful pronoun video resources include:

Intro to prepositions (Khan Academy)
Time Prepositions (Khan Academy)
Prepositions in Space (Khan Academy)
Other Prepositions (Khan Academy)
Fun, basic preposition song #1 (Scratch Garden)
Fun, basic preposition song #2 (Scratch Garden)
Motion Preposition Song (Scratch Garden)

Grammar Fun Stuff

Looking to add to your teaching wardrobe via fun grammar t-shirts and sweatshirts? Check out some of these fun ones! Don’t forget to check out Piper and Ivy. They have some really fun book and reading t-shirts and sweatshirts.

I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar Sweatshirt