From Teacher Magazine at www.teachermagazine.org
Published: August 17, 2009
Jamming to Learn Grammar
Comment: Here's a great way for young people to learn grammar. Believe it or not, it will be more and more important for people to succeed if they know how to use the language properly. Grammar is something parents hand down to children. So this might be a family gig.
NICHOLSON, Ga. (AP) — Crystal Huau Mills knows it's tough for 9-year-olds to focus on learning nouns and verbs — grammar can be too boring and technical to hold the attention of an energetic third-grader.
So, to get the young scholars excited and to help them memorize a confusing and boring subject, she wrote a song.
Three years later, what started out as one song has grown into "Grammar Jammar," a 42-minute DVD based on a compilation of Mills' jams teachers and parents can use to relay basic grammar skills to children in kindergarten through fifth grade.
"(Grammar is) like learning a different language, with all the different rules and the parts of speech," said Mills, who taught for five years at Benton Elementary School in Jackson County. "It's a lot to take in, and it's not very exciting."
Students in her third-grade class struggled to recognize different types of nouns, so she wrote the first song to explain the difference between proper nouns and regular nouns, then recruited friend and musician Bryan Shaw to blend her words with a catchy tune.
"(Shaw) pretty much took my words from an e-mail and turned them into a song," Mills said. "He's good at that. He can take your words and twist them around and write the music for it. We kind of did that one song after another, and before we knew it, we had 13 different songs."
Shortly after Mills debuted the songs in her class, other teachers started using them to help students with their grammar.
"The tunes are just so catchy that (students) want to sing along with it, but at the same time, they don't really realize that they're learning grammar," said Ashley Watkins, who teaches kindergarten at Benton Elementary. "It's a great tool to introduce and reinforce those concepts that they have to learn."
As they took the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, students mouthed words to the songs before bubbling in answers, said third-grade teacher Laura Becker.
"I saw it being really effective in that way," Becker said. "These kids really remembered the songs."
Eventually, Mills produced a script combining the songs into a school musical.
In the musical, Mills acts as a teacher frustrated with an apathetic class of students. When she falls asleep, her unenthusiastic class transforms into a crowd of eager students, and inanimate objects like clocks, globes and flags come to life.
One performance caught the eye of Justin Carter, owner of Justin Wayne Casting in Athens, a casting company for independent films.
"I saw people who would not necessarily like theater or the arts really just get into it," Carter said. "They really responded well to it for just a little school production. That's how I knew it had potential. It was a good starting point."
In May 2008, Mills and a mostly volunteer crew of performers started work on the "Grammar Jammar" video. The crew spent three months taping at places like the cafeteria of Prince Avenue Christian School and North Oconee High School.
In an early part of the video, Mills' students dance at a '50s sock hop to a song about subjects and predicates.
In another scene, a life-size bottle of ketchup sings to students around a cafeteria table about imperative sentences.
"Imperative is a command like, 'Go to school.' It ends in a period or an exclamation point," the condiment explains.
Mills started college as a theater major but switched to education in her freshman year at the University of Georgia.
She started teaching at the Jackson County school in 2003, and decided to keep her passion for the performing arts alive, acting in plays at several local theaters and running an after-school drama club for students.
"There's not enough music or performing arts in the classroom or the public schools any more," Mills said. "So that's how 'Grammar Jammar' came to be. I see a need for the arts in education, and I saw that need and figured kids learn better through songs, so why not help that along?"
In July, Mills debuted "Grammar Jammar" at the Athens-Clarke County Library and took the DVD on the road to promote it at the Southeast Home School expo held in Atlanta.
The producers are selling the video and have a Web site, GrammarJammar.com, where parents and teachers can order copies.
For her next project, Mills is attempting to adapt a student workbook to go with the video.
"I see it going many places," Mills said. "Children's books, picture books ... who knows — maybe even a Saturday morning special on PBS."
Bryan Shaw, Grammar Jammar's lead musician, sings about subjects and predicates — "two parts to every sentence" — as Crystal Mills plays the part of the teacher. Danny Conkle is on base and Charlie Garland on guitar.
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