Even my senior high school students struggled with basic grammar. They didn’t capitalize “I.” Their punctuation was wrong or flat-out missing. When students are missing so many grammar foundations, where do you even begin—and how do you decide what to teach first?

After years of teaching struggling writers, I’ve found that grammar instruction works best when skills are taught in a logical sequence and then continually reviewed. In this post, I’ll walk you through the high school grammar sequence I recommend, including what I prioritize, what I sometimes skip, and how I adapt the sequence for different students.

(You can also grab more tips for teaching grammar right here.)

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products that I personally use and love, or think my readers will find useful.

My Recommended High School Grammar Sequence

If you’re trying to figure out what order to teach grammar in high school, here’s the sequence I recommend:

1. Assess your students and determine your goals
2. Review the basics
   • Parts of speech
   • Complete sentences
   • Independent and dependent clauses
   • Phrases and verbals, as appropriate
3. Teach punctuation
   • Apostrophes
   • Colons and semicolons
   • Hyphens and dashes
   • Commas
4. Add advanced grammar lessons or focus on review
5. Spiral and practice grammar throughout the year

You don’t necessarily need to teach every grammar concept to every student. The right grammar sequence depends on where your students are starting, where they need to go, and how much instructional time you have.

I’ll break down each step below and explain which skills I consider essential, which ones you can potentially skip, and how to adjust the sequence for different students.

Want to skip building your own grammar sequence? My Grammar Lessons Bundle includes the lessons that follow the sequence outlined in this post. Or, if you want a more complete system with assessments, quizzes, review worksheets, and warm-ups, check out my High School Grammar Unit Bundle.

Sequence Grammar Step #1: Determine How In-depth You Need to Go

Before you decide what grammar to teach, you need to take a look at your student population. The right grammar sequence for an AP class may look very different from the right sequence for a class full of students who are still struggling with complete sentences.

Where do these students want to go? With those AP and Honors students, you will need to prepare them for college-level work and beyond. Based on their course selection, a college degree is probably their goal.

But if your students have different post-high-school goals, you may not need to teach grammar as in-depth. These students still need strong writing skills, but you may be able to spend less time on terminology and obscure grammar rules and more time on the skills they’ll actually use.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t teach those students grammar well. It just means that you may be able to skip some obscure grammar rules to better focus on the ones students will need daily.

If you have no idea where your students are starting from and where they’d like to go, find out!

A great idea is to give students some kind of pre-assessment during the first week of class (like the pre-assessment included here!). You can give a formative assessment to find out their current skill level or hand out a survey about their goals post-high school. You can even assign a quick writing task to take student writing samples.

I also recommend talking to your school counselors. Where do your students go after they graduate, statistically?

My Students’ Needs

I worked at a Title 1 alternative school. Most of my students did not pursue higher education after they graduated. (In fact, many were the first in their families to graduate high school). The ones who did go to college usually went to a technical college. 

These same students often came into their senior year with a third-grade reading level. They did not know how to capitalize or use periods. Realistically, I wasn’t going to take them from where they were starting to collegiate-level grammar in the single semester I had them. 

I could, however, build up their foundations, teach them about sentence structure, and give them the tools they needed to make sure that their writing was acceptable for a career.

Like everything else, make sure you’re planning for your students and meeting them where they are.

Once you know where your students are starting and what they need to be able to do, you can decide how far back your grammar sequence needs to go.

Sequence Grammar Step #2: Determine How Far Back You Need to Go

Ok, so you know where your students are going. You know where they are now. 

The next question is: how far back do you need to go to build on their existing knowledge and skill level?

Unfortunately, for many older students, that may mean going all the way back to the parts of speech. My senior students remembered mostly what a noun was, verbs and adjectives sounded familiar, and everything else was lost.

You might have students who can write complete sentences naturally but fumble when it comes to more sophisticated punctuation, like the semicolon.

The further back you have to go, the less you’ll probably be able to cover. Remember, however, that sometimes you do have to go slow to go fast later.

The rest of this post is my suggested sequence of grammar topics. If your students need to start at the beginning, start at the beginning. If they can start with punctuation, do that.

But I don’t recommend jumping around.

Grammatical structures build on one another. For example, students need to understand clauses before they can consistently apply several punctuation rules. Taking the time to establish those foundations can make later grammar instruction much easier.

Before you even begin teaching grammar, it might be helpful to show students why they need to learn it. Explaining the importance of grammar and proper punctuation to my students always provided a little bit more buy-in and fewer groans when I began my lessons.

(Want a done-for-you lesson that does this? Grab my “Why Study Grammar?” Lesson!)

Sequence Grammar Step #3: Start With the Basics

Assuming your students are like mine and struggle with putting sentences together, this is where your grammar sequence should begin.

Even if your students generally write well and just need to learn more advanced punctuation, I think it’s worth reviewing sentence structure. Making sure everyone is using the same terms to describe the parts of a sentence will be helpful later. Plus, it’s hard to explain semicolons and other punctuation if students don’t understand clauses.

The Foundation: What to Teach First

Grammar skill	Priority	Why it matters
Nouns and verbs	Essential	Students need to recognize the basic building blocks of sentences.
Complete sentences	Essential	Students need to understand what makes a sentence complete.
Independent and dependent clauses	Essential	Clauses provide the foundation for sentence structure and later punctuation instruction.
Phrases	Optional	Useful for advanced students and more sophisticated sentence analysis.
Verbals	Useful	Helps students distinguish verbals from the actual verb in a sentence.

This doesn’t mean every student needs to master every one of these concepts before moving on. Your students’ starting points and goals should determine how deeply you go. Here’s how I approach each part of the sequence.

Parts of Speech

My students were completely lost on parts of speech. This made even talking about sentence structure difficult. To place semicolons, students need to understand clauses; to understand clauses, they need to recognize the parts of speech that make up those clauses.

So this is where I started with, yes, my seniors in high school. I didn’t want to waste a whole quarter getting them to identify every part of speech when most students were never going to be asked to identify an adverb after they left my class.

In my opinion, students absolutely need to understand nouns and verbs. Everything else can be fudged or explained along the way, but you can’t dive deeper into sentence structure without these.

If you have the time, or your students remember nouns and verbs but are fuzzy on others, you can totally take the time to review all of the parts of speech. 

Don’t move on, however, until students understand nouns and verbs. 

Need a ready-to-use lesson? My Grammar: Sentences Lesson covers nouns, verbs, subjects, and predicates with a slideshow, handout, and worksheets.

Phrases

Once students have a grasp on the parts of speech, you can begin to teach phrases—if your students need them.

Understanding phrases can be helpful for students preparing for AP exams or college-level writing because it gives them a broader view of sentence structure and helps them break down complex sentences.

If your students are starting way behind or don’t need advanced grammar skills, however, I think you can skip phrases.

I touch on phrases a bit when I talk about verbals, but teaching students to identify every type of phrase has never been a priority for me. It hasn’t prevented my students from writing solid essays.

If you have the time or have advanced students who can handle the complexity of phrases, go for it! You’ll definitely be giving them an edge. 

But if you’re short on time or trying to bridge a huge knowledge gap, I believe you can skip phrases or touch on them in the moment later. 

Clauses 

This is where grammar gets real.

I believe that all students need to understand independent and dependent clauses. These are the foundation for sentence structure and several of the punctuation skills you’ll teach later.

(Want to dive deeply into teaching clauses? Read my post about teaching clauses to high schoolers over here!)

Personally, I think you can skip noun and adjective clauses without creating a huge deficit for your students. I’m an English teacher, and no one has ever asked me to find a noun clause. 

But if students can identify independent and dependent clauses, they can place colons and semicolons. They can vary their sentence structure. They can not only create correct sentences, but they can start to get creative with their writing. 

I also like teaching clauses because it reinforces those parts of speech you just taught. In order to find those clauses, students will need to identify nouns and adjectives. (One thing I love about grammar is how linear it is–where else do we get that in ELA?!) Review naturally builds itself into lessons!

Tips for Teaching Clauses

I highly recommend sticking with “independent” and “dependent” clauses for your verbiage! I think these terms are easier for students to remember and they’re intuitive–the independent clause “don’t need no one,” and the dependent clauses are… well… dependent on another. 

“Subordinate clause” makes sense if you have a great understanding of subordinating conjunctions, but in my experience, many students do not. “Main clause” makes sense, but it doesn’t go with “dependent” quite like “independent.” Whatever terminology you use, stick to it throughout the entire course to prevent unnecessary confusion for your students. 

When it comes to clauses, I like to teach students about sentence types. Now, do I care if my students can label complex sentences vs. compound sentences? Not at all. But examining the four types of sentence structures does, in my opinion, make the topic of clauses easier.

Need a lesson that covers sentence structure? Grab my Clauses and Sentence Types Lesson here.

Verbals

Verbals are useful, but I don’t think every student needs to master them.

I won’t lie to you—verbals are a pain to teach. I preface every verbals lesson with “This will be hard. It’s ok that it’s hard. I will never ask you on a high-stakes test to find and identify verbals. But, understanding that they exist will help you correctly find the verb more often.”

My goal when teaching verbals isn’t that students could find and identify them 100% of the time. (When would they need that in life?) But, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t mistake a verbal for the “real verb” in a sentence. That could lead to misidentifying a clause, which could in turn lead to misusing punctuation. 

If your students can handle a grammar challenge, go crazy with verbals! They are challenging and require students to really understand the structure of a sentence. Plus, if you taught students about phrases, you can use verbal phrases to build on those existing skills. 

For students that struggle or have a huge deficit, however, I think it’s ok to talk about verbals without requiring students to master them.

(This post dives into the “how-tos” of teaching verbals.)

I recommend going over verbals with all students. For advanced students, feel free to go in-depth and have students identify verbal phrases, too. With other students, however, they just need to understand the difference between a verbal and a verb before moving on. 

(If you’re looking for a great lesson to introduce verbals, my Verbals Lesson will gently introduce your students to gerunds, participles, and infinitives.)

Sequence Grammar Step #4: Move on To Punctuation

At this point, students should understand the basics of sentence structure and have a solid foundation for putting sentences together. Before moving on to punctuation, students should be able to identify complete and incomplete sentences and write complete sentences themselves.

Once those foundations are in place, I recommend moving through punctuation in this order:

Apostrophes → Colons & Semicolons → Hyphens & Dashes → Commas

This isn’t the only possible punctuation sequence, but I like this order because it starts with relatively manageable rules and gradually builds toward the more complicated rules for commas. More importantly, the punctuation lessons give you repeated opportunities to review the sentence structure skills students learned earlier.

Of course, this isn’t a rigid sequence. If your students need a different starting point, adjust accordingly. I like to start with the easier punctuation concepts because students can build confidence before tackling the many rules surrounding commas.

However, if I teach other pieces of punctuation first, by the time we get to commas, students will have already learned several comma rules. (They should, for example, already know to use commas with coordinating conjunctions from learning about clauses in a sentence.)

At the beginning of every punctuation lesson, make sure students know what that piece of punctuation looks like. You’d be amazed by the number of students who mix up apostrophes and commas or colons and semicolons. 

For more information, check out my blog post “How To Teach Punctuation to High Schoolers.”

Apostrophes

You could probably swap apostrophes with colons and semicolons in your sequence, but personally, I like to cover apostrophes first. They’re relatively straightforward, they come up constantly in student writing, and apostrophe errors are extremely common.

(This post covers teaching apostrophes extensively.)

While teaching apostrophes, use the opportunity to review nouns, since nouns are the words that can take possession of other words.

Also, you cannot review the difference between “its” and “it’s” too many times. 

Before students move on, they should understand the rules of apostrophes and understand the “it’s” exception.

Aim for proficiency, however, not perfection before moving on. If students are using apostrophes correctly most of the time, but are still tripping up on difficult examples, I think that’s ok. As you move forward in your punctuation lessons, there will be more opportunities to keep reviewing and practicing. 

(Need a ready-to-use apostrophes lesson? This lesson includes instruction, examples, and worksheets to help students reach the proficiency you’re aiming for.)

Colons and Semicolons

Teach colons and semicolons back-to-back. They sound so similar that students often struggle to differentiate the rules and what each piece of punctuation looks like.

(I have a post here for teaching semicolons and here for colons!)

Teaching colons and semicolons is also a great opportunity to review clauses. Students aren’t learning an isolated punctuation rule. They’re applying the clause skills they learned earlier.

Do not be afraid to stop and review clauses again before or during your colon and semicolon lessons! Most students don’t retain their grammar knowledge because their other teachers didn’t constantly review the lessons. But you’re not like those other teachers–you are committed to your students’ grammar skills! So, if need be, go back and review before moving on. 

Again, I don’t think students need to necessarily master these pieces of punctuation before moving on, but they should be proficient. (When the opportunity arises while looking at example sentences, take some time to point out apostrophes and keep reviewing those, too!)

Want ready-to-use lessons? My Colon Lesson and Semicolon Lesson both include instruction and practice, and both reinforce the clause skills students need to use these punctuation marks correctly.

Hyphens and Dashes

Hyphens and dashes are useful, but they’re lower priority than the punctuation skills above. If you’re short on instructional time, these are concepts you can spend less time on. If you have advanced students or want to give students more tools for sophisticated writing, however, they’re worth teaching.

Like the colons and semicolons, hyphens and dashes are easy to mix up, so I recommend teaching them together or back-to-back. 

For more advanced students (and assuming you have the time), aim for proficiency here. A properly placed dash in a sentence is *chef’s kiss* and can really add dimension to academic writing. 

For struggling students, however, it might be enough for them to just know that these pieces of punctuation exist and what they’re doing in a sentence. 

This lesson covers both hyphens and dashes. It’s important to begin talking about how punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence if you haven’t had these conversations with students before.

Commas

Commas are the most complicated part of my punctuation sequence. There are so many rules that students can easily become overwhelmed, so I save them until students have already built a foundation in sentence structure and learned several other punctuation rules.

Like with verbals, I always start my comma lessons by encouraging students not to get overwhelmed. There is a lot to keep track of! 

I also like to remind them of how much they already know about commas. If you taught them about clauses, they should be able to use commas with coordinating conjunctions or after introductory dependent clauses. 

This is one of the biggest benefits of sequencing grammar: earlier lessons aren’t finished when you move on. They become tools students can use to understand and apply later skills.

Your students probably already know that commas go between items in a list or after greetings in a letter. 

So don’t let them despair before they even get started. 

Teach comma rules one by one, giving students time to practice each rule after. Provide lots of examples. As you go, you should find ways to review clauses and other pieces of punctuation easily. 

Need help teaching all those comma rules? My Commas Lesson breaks eight essential comma rules into manageable pieces with examples and practice.

My Punctuation Sequence

Apostrophes → Colons & Semicolons → Hyphens & Dashes → Commas

Remember, this is a suggested sequence, not a rigid rule. Adjust the depth and pacing based on your students—but don’t be afraid to slow down and review earlier skills when students need them.

Sequence Grammar Step #5: Add Advanced Lessons Or Review Like Crazy

If your students have mastered the foundational skills above and you still have time left in your course, congratulations! You can now either expand their grammar toolbox with more advanced concepts or spend that time practicing and reviewing what they’ve already learned.

For most students—especially students who entered your class with significant gaps—I would choose review over simply adding more grammar topics. Learning a concept once isn’t enough. Students need repeated opportunities to recognize and use those skills before the knowledge becomes automatic.

If your students are ready for more advanced work, consider adding concepts like appositives, dangling participles, subject-verb agreement, end punctuation, or the ellipsis.

You don’t need to add these simply because you have extra days to fill. Choose concepts that will give your particular students useful tools for their writing.

Finally, reflect on your sequence at the end of the semester or year. Where did students struggle? Which skills needed more review? Did you rush through clauses because you wanted to get to punctuation? Did students need more practice before moving on?

Use that information to adjust your grammar sequence the next time you teach the course.

What If I Don’t Have Time to Teach Everything?

You don’t have to. If you’re teaching students with significant grammar gaps, I’d rather see them leave your class with a strong understanding of complete sentences, clauses, and essential punctuation than a shallow understanding of twenty different grammar terms.

Prioritize the skills that will have the biggest impact on your students’ writing, and spiral those skills throughout the year. A shorter sequence that students actually retain is more valuable than a comprehensive grammar curriculum they barely remember.

How to Make Your Grammar Sequence Work

A good grammar sequence isn’t something you teach once and then leave behind. You’ll need to adjust it from year to year and class to class based on what your students actually know. Most importantly, you’ll want to build regular opportunities for review and practice into the sequence.

If your students are very behind in their skills, I have some additional tips right here. It’s ok if you sequence grammar lessons but don’t get to cover everything. The goal is just to move your students forward.

Make Grammar Part of Daily Instruction

I recommend making grammar part of your daily instruction. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but you should touch on grammar every. Single. Day.

This doesn’t mean you need a 45-minute grammar lesson every day. A short warm-up, editing exercise, or quick review can keep previously taught skills active while you devote more class time to literature and writing.

Daily grammar doesn’t mean daily grammar worksheets. The goal is to keep those skills active so students have repeated opportunities to apply what they’ve learned.

Integrate Grammar Into Writing

Build high grammar expectations into everything else in your classroom, too. Give mechanics and conventions high marks on writing rubrics. Have students peer-edit each other’s work. Add grammar games when you can.

The goal is for students to recognize that grammar isn’t something they only do during a grammar lesson. It’s part of every piece of writing they produce.

Check Student Learning

As we all know, teaching a topic isn’t enough. You need to know whether students actually retained it.

Use regular low-stakes quizzes, writing samples, editing exercises, and a few larger assessments to keep tabs on student growth.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This is exactly what I need, but I don’t have time to create all of it,” that’s where my grammar curriculum comes in.

Spiral Previously Taught Skills

Don’t assume that moving on means students have mastered the previous skill. Keep bringing old concepts back into new lessons.

When you teach commas, review clauses. When you teach sentence variety, review sentence structure. When students are writing, point out the grammar skills you’ve already taught.

A good grammar sequence isn’t a straight line. It’s a spiral. Students should encounter important skills repeatedly in new contexts.

Conclusion

There isn’t one perfect grammar sequence for every high school classroom. The best sequence depends on what your students already know, what they need to be able to do, and how much time you have to teach them.

But if your students are struggling with the basics, don’t feel like you have to teach every grammar rule ever written. Start with the foundations, build skills in a logical order, and keep spiraling back to what you’ve already taught.

If your students have arrived in your classroom unable to write a grammatically correct sentence, taking the time to strengthen those foundations can have a huge impact on their future academic and career success. Grammar is essential for effective communication.

Of course, knowing what to teach is only half the battle. You still have to plan all of those lessons, create student materials, build practice activities, and figure out how to assess everything.

If you don’t want to spend hours creating a grammar curriculum from scratch, I’ve already done the planning for you.

Need the sequenced lessons?

My Grammar Lessons Bundle gives you the lessons that follow the sequence outlined in this post. Each lesson includes the instructional materials, student resources, practice, and answer keys you need to teach the skill.

The lessons follow the exact sequence outlined in this post, so you don’t have to figure out what to teach next.

Get the Grammar Lessons Bundle!

Want the complete grammar system?

My High School Grammar Unit Bundle takes it a step further with the lessons plus assessments, quizzes, review worksheets, and grammar warm-ups for a more complete year-long grammar program.

Get the High School Grammar Unit Bundle