Grammar Bytes! (In a Good Way.)

Looking for a great writing website that you can use with learners or that learners can use on their own? Grammar Bytes—“Grammar instruction with attitude!”—may be a familiar website to some of you, but if you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth a look!

Grammar Bytes is a great resource for use with pre-GED, GED, diploma, college-prep learners and advanced ELLs. I have used the materials in a structured class setting, for one-on-one sessions with learners, for use with a volunteer, or to assign independent work to supplement class lessons or to help learners build grammar, usage and mechanics skills at home, in an open lab setting or at a library.

This is a go-to website for my classroom instruction, especially when I want my learners to practice what I consider some particularly pesky areas of language use:

• verb agreement with complicated subjects
• pronoun agreement and reference
• apostrophes and commas
• irregular verbs (including a challenging exercise on lay/lie!)

Here are some highlights of the website:

• Grammar terms: handy explanations with examples and some YouTube videos. I love the explanations of different kinds of phrases (noun, infinitive, verb, gerund, prepositional, participle and absolute), which is so useful when working with instruction in sentence variety and sentence combining.
• Exercises with accompanying handouts: learners can do the exercises online, can complete the activity on paper or do both! Online exercises include immediate feedback and detailed explanations of the correct answers.
• Presentations: PowerPoints that teachers or learners can use with handouts that follow the exercise items in the presentations. If learners don’t have Microsoft Office on their computers, the site provides a link for a FREE viewer from Microsoft.
• Tips and Rules: useful tips and rules for correcting sentence structure, usage, comma and apostrophe issues.

The explanations and exercises contain highly creative content, interesting vocabulary choices and humor. All materials are printer friendly, and no extra permission is required to photocopy for use with learners.

There are a variety of instructional uses for the material on the Grammar Bytes website, and I hope you and your learners can really “sink your teeth” into it.