Grammar

I have the Christmas carols blasting in the background (well, as loud as you can when five children are sleeping).  My marking for today is done.  We started the week with a piece of writing (drafted in class, own editing, then re-written by them the next period) so that I could have a quick sneak snapshot at how they are with on the spot writing.  I made a rubric that used similar criteria to the E-astle writing and I have been able to see clearly already that their ideas are confidently Multistructural, with several students being clearly Relational.  The writing has also shown me that I need to think about different ways to present grammar and the rules surrounding it to my students.

Source

I have these memories of a big thick yellow grammar textbook and working through pages and pages of diagramming out sentences (do we still do that? anyone?) along with circling direct objects, underlining the verbs, and double underlining the adverbs.   I am sure exercises and 'rote' learning have some place (somewhere), but I am not convinced that it is the best way for my students.  I know last year they really enjoyed (and I saw better use of sentence structure/grammar in the assessments afterwards) gamification - so I need to explore what is available at the higher year levels.

So ... some questions ... what do you use for teaching grammar and sentence construction in your classroom?  What rubrics/SOLO taxonomy  breakdowns have you used (if you don't mind sharing)?