Blueprinting the Basics

In my decade of instructing ESL students, I learned that there’s no shortage of grammar resources, but many of them tend to drag out concepts across many pages with overly-complex definitions. These resources often leave it to the teacher to parse and compress that information into a bite-size, student-friendly format.

Figuring out how to model these concepts in a consistent, reproducible way was a daily dose of stress for many years, and I decided it was high time to attempt to ease the pain that is grammar for myself and my students. The initial focus was on creating basic charts for the most fundamental elements which depicted core sentence components, like the ‘BE’ verb shown below.

Concrete Color Coding

After developing several of these basic charts, I devised a proprietary verb tense system that assigns a concrete color to each tense that correlates both to curriculum progression and degree of difficulty:

Green = simple tenses
Blue = Progressive tenses
Red = Perfect tenses
Blue + Red make Purple = Perfect Progressive tenses

Iteration into Full Page

The color-coded system proved intuitive and the verb tense cards performed well in class with my students. Through subsequent iterations, I  expanded upon the chart format, utilizing a full page that allowed for more complete diagrams, including a timeline at the bottom and better sentence variations.

The single-page format is relatively dense, but the objective was to put everything needed to teach a grammar concept in one place. Each breakdown is intended to be read or transferred directly onto the whiteboard. Kid-friendly fonts boost approachability while grammatical annotation of the sentences leave no room for error or interpretation. Eventually, practice sentences on the facing page were included for review activities.

Becoming a Book

Like many projects that snowball, it wasn’t long before the 1-page 1-concepting led to dozens of elements being diagrammed. Initially, it was just the most common elements (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc), but since all the components of grammar are intimately linked, it grew to encompass 60 elements and 12 verb tenses in all. I figured I might as well make it into a book.

Branding

Determined not to become another yawn-inducing grammar compendium, I decided to brand this endeavor. Grammar Grandma was a combination of the homophonic similarity between ‘Grandma’ and ‘Grammar’ which is something of an inside joke in ESL classrooms, but also references the cultural connotation of Grandmothers being revered fonts of wisdom in many cultures; particularly true in Asia.

Besides being a revered source of approachable wisdom, the matriarchal mascot let herself well to the Ke-Ai aesthetic. Translated as adorable or cute, this concept is extremely pervasive throughout Asia and useful when making something boring or outright torturous appear a bit more friendly. Kind of like getting your teeth pulled by Hello Kitty.

The liberal use of teal has no cultural significance, but rather operates on a psychological level; blending the calm tranquility of blue with a bit of the energized optimism of green. Perfect for a classroom situation where a focused, but relaxed student is the ideal sponge.

Supplemental Materials

Beyond the book, a number of supplemental materials were developed in the form of flashcard sets and posters, to assist with drills, classroom games, or print-outs that could be hung in the classroom (or shrunk down into single-pages and passed around, absent the book itself).

GG Online

Like any properly obsessive project, the momentum had taken over and this snowball rolled online. I developed a potential website optimized for classroom use that would feature audio recordings, quizzes with leaderboards, and interactive review activities. Though the concept was a bit too extensive for the school’s purposes in which I was then working, it has been live-archived just in case.