Having a set of “staple” grammar worksheets for your therapy can be a huge time-saver.
Most of us have them, and can probably think of a couple times these handy grammar worksheets or card decks have saved us when we’ve had to resort to last minute planning when we’ve gotten swamped.
These appeal to a lot of us because they don’t take hours to assemble.
The problem is that many of us aren’t sure if using grammar worksheets or card decks are in line with EBP.
Despite that nagging feeling that we SHOULD be finding evidence to support what we’re doing, many clinicians find it hard to find the time to find a references for every tool in their toolbox.
That’s why I’m doing some of that work for you, and I’m going to show you an SLP-created tool that’s easy to use, and nails some practices outlined in the published research.
The resource is the Upper Level Vocabulary Curriculum Guided Worksheets, and was created by Shannon Werbeckes from Speechy Musings.
It comes complete with grammar worksheets to build vocabulary, syntax, and morphological awareness.
I stumbled across this product when I was looking for resources to help build prefixes and suffixes, such as the tools I describe in this article here.
Shannon’s tool stood out as a clear must-buy, which is why I got it right away.
Even though the overall focus of the tool is on vocabulary as a whole rather than just morphology, I put it immediately in my “grammar worksheets” go-to toolbox.
Once I walk you through what’s in it, you’ll see why.
If you’ve read this protocol for effective grammar intervention, or this article about adding the “magic bullet” to your language therapy, you know how important it is to add “active and extended use” to therapy focused on building grammar and vocabulary skills.
Simply put, when we want our students to learn any linguistic skill, they need practice using it in a bunch of different situations.
For students who have poor grammar and sentence structure, problems could lie in weak awareness of word meanings and word parts.
Studying those word parts is a critical piece of instruction, but we can’t stop there. Another necessary piece is giving students repeated opportunities to practice using those words we’ve studied (Beck & Mckeown, 2007; Zipoli, Coyne, & McCoach, 2011).
If you’re going to study meanings of prefixes and suffixes, it might not be enough to simply study the words. We need to think of creative ways to use those words.
Tools like the ones I’ve mentioned here are great ways to build morphological awareness, but we need to add that extra element of functional practice for the skills to generalize.
These Upper Level Vocabulary Curriculum Guided Worksheets will help you do that without hours of planning.
They come with a massive set of different vocabulary building activities spread out over 100 worksheets in this 237-page product.
Each worksheet is a little different, which means that you don’t have to do the same exercises for each target word.
Shannon has also included some editable files you can use to customize the activities if you wanted to add your own curricular vocabulary or mix and match vocabulary with different exercises.
You essentially have an endless number of options if you wanted to switch the activities around for different target words.
I don’t think I could do this justice with a short synopsis, so if you want to see it in action you’ll want to check out this blog post about teaching upper level vocabulary strategies in speech therapy.
The post has a short video description and she shows you how the worksheets look and what activities are covered
Some people may criticize grammar worksheets because it’s easy to resort to drill and kill exercises when we use them.
We can solve that problem if we use them instead for strategic practice of skills our students need, they can be both effective and efficient.
Thankfully, Shannon’s guided grammar worksheets come with a set of instructions we can clearly tie back to published research. I’ll point out a couple now:
Strategy #1: “Hear it, say it, write it.”
This is the first step in the instructions for the product. To complete the step, the student has to say the target word five times, count the syllables, read the word in a sentence, write it, and then identify it from a list of words with similar letters.
Asking a student to say a word both in isolation and in the context of a sentence can help build a phonological representation of a word, which is a critical piece of vocabulary knowledge (Kucan, 2012).
Counting syllables is another skill that can help build phonological awareness, and is correlated with reading performance (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994).
These simple steps ensure you’re adding to your students’ phonological representations of the words you’re teaching.
Strategy #2: Self-assessment and self-questioning
For step two in the product instructions, students need to rate their knowledge of the target word on a scale from one to five. The five “levels” of knowing a word Shannon has described here are similar to levels of word knowledge in a couple seminal sources that suggest that we learn words in stages (Beck, McKeown, & Omanson, 1987; Dale & O’Rourke, 1976).
Taking these levels of word knowledge and asking students to self-evaluate adds another powerful piece: metalinguistic awareness.
The mere act of self-questioning is a technique that help students monitor their own comprehension as they’re learning.
This self-evaluation piece can make students more aware of how they learn and what helps them understand (Joseph, Alber-Morgan, Cullen, & Rouse, 2015).
Adding this element to grammar worksheets can provide that awareness our students are often missing.
Strategy # 3: Tried and True Exercises for “Active and Extended” Use
This next one is more of a set of strategies that fall under an umbrella category, rather than just one.
The rest of these grammar worksheets are pretty straightforward because they simply involve completing the rest of the activities outline and making sure that students are self-evaluating throughout the process; so I’ll let you check those out on your own.
Right now, I want to talk about the exercises that come after “Hear it, Say it, Write it” and initial self-questioning, because this is really the highlight of this tool.
There are too many great exercises in this product to cover them all, but I want to point a couple out that will give our students repeated practice with vocabulary words. Without this repeated practice, we might not see any functional improvement in grammar.
I’ve included studies that support each below. They include:
Asking students questions that require them to think about or use target words (Walsh & Blewitt, 2006)
Drawing attention to and studying multiple meaning words (Zipke, 2012)
Practice defining words/explaining semantic information (Beck & Mckeown, 2007; Zipoli et al., 2011)
Making inferences about words or word meanings using context (Cain, 2007)
Studying morphemes (e.g., affixes, roots, bases) in words and their meanings (Apel & Lawrence, 2011)
The list could go on, but those are some heavy-hitters that aren’t often included on many grammar worksheets, but are so essential to generalization.
You can see that the last one relates directly to building morphology; which is why I’d recommend that you utilize this activity for any student with poor grammar skills.
Since you can edit the worksheets, you could reuse the worksheet with the morphology exercise often for students who needed to build affix knowledge. You can find this exercise on the 12th page of the packet, which is called “Level One, Set One, Word Three”.
The key takeaway here is that grammar worksheets don’t have to be drill and kill if they include the right activities, or if there’s specific feedback and support along the way.
To get the The Upper Level Vocabulary Curriculum Guided Worksheets, visit the Speechy Musings TpT product page here, and to see a full description and video guide, visit this post on Shannon’s blog here.
I have no affiliation with Speechy Musings, and there’s no financial incentive for me in recommending this resource. My only motivation is that I’ll be spreading the word about a great product.
If you liked this article, you may also like this free guide for SLPs.
It’s called The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure.
Inside you’ll learn exactly how to focus your language therapy. Including:
- The hidden culprit behind unexplained “processing problems” that’s often overlooked.
- The deceptively simple way to write language goals; so you’re not spending hours on paperwork (goal bank included).
- The 4 sentence types often behind comprehension and expression issues and why they’re so difficult.
- An easy-to-implement “low-prep” strategy proven to boost sentence structure, comprehension, and written language (conjunctions flashcards included).
References
Dale, E., & O’Rourke, J. (1976). The living word vocabulary. Chicago, IL. Field Enterprises.
