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Grammar Girl: “Through,” “threw,” and “thru.”

I subscribed to the Grammar Girl podcast because I happened to be wrapping up a few different topics in grammar and reviewing things we’d learned throughout the year. I was looking for a different type of resource to make the learning more fun and interesting for my students, so I thought I’d give the now popular Grammar Girl a try.

We had just been taking notes on different homophones, so I played a podcast for my students that focused on the words “through,” “threw,” and “thru.” When I previewed this podcast, I was excited to learn something new about the “thru” form of the word myself. I liked that Grammar Girl talked about the fact that she herself had to look up the answer to the question about that word and talked about her resources used. I think that was a good eye-opener to my students that they aren’t supposed to know it all, but they are supposed to be able to find the answers to things they don’t know by appropriately using the resources available when necessary

After playing the podcast I asked my students what they got out of it. They definitely took in the message of her lesson and learned when and how to use each form of the word. When I asked for feedback, though, I was surprised at how many of my students really didn’t like the podcast and would have rather taken the notes from my direct instruction like they are used to with grammar. We listened to the podcast through my computer, and I think I can assume that, had they each listened to it on their own iPods, their reactions likely would have changed! Grammar Girl also said the word "homophone" different from how we're used to hearing it, so several students commented on how distracting that was. Some students did comment, though, that they thought this would be a good new resource for them to use if they had a grammatical question. Then, as a class we looked at some of the different topics we’ve discussed this year that Grammar Girl has podcasts for. A few days later, one of my students approached me very excited over the fact that he’d seen a Grammar Girl reference book at Barnes and Noble.

Though this particular Grammar Girl podcast didn’t excite my students greatly, they did learn from it. It also created a buzz in the room about the idea of podcasts more than I would have expected. Students have asked to create their own podcasts and have been searching for new podcasts at home and sharing their findings with me at school. This particular podcast took only about five minutes out of my day, and I feel that it has introduced my students to an entirely new resource that they hadn’t thought of in the past. To me, that definitely makes it worthwhile!

Grammar Girl Podcast: media type="file" key="126 126 GG Through the Looking Glass.mp3"