Introduction

Nearly two in five ākonga in Aotearoa are below expected literacy levels by Year 4 [1]. If children are struggling to read, they’re struggling to learn, and the way grammar is taught isn’t switching them on. Maths has blocks, rods and counters to make its abstract rules physical. Literacy still mostly has worksheets and flashcards.

Grammar Gizmos is a set of four wooden tools that make sentence structure something you can hold. Colour-coded shapes stand in for the parts of a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence, and moving them shows how those parts connect, giving 7–8 year olds who struggle with the ‘why’ of syntax a hands-on way in.

N.B. The physical copies of the toolset were produced by Embrace Design in Wellington. Concept, design and all imagery produced by Pixel Ponderer.

The Solution

It started with Montessori solids. I loved how tactile they are, but they sit still, and they’re missing the one thing a verb is: motion. I wanted to build the physics of a sentence, a skeleton that carries grammar from the hands, to the page, to the mind.

The breakthrough was one sentence: the cat chases the mouse. Stripped back, it isn’t really words at all, it’s forces. A subject (the cat) applies an action (chases) to an object (the mouse). Grammar Gizmos gives each part a fixed shape and colour: a red circle for the subject, a yellow bar for the verb and a blue circle-square for the object. The shapes never change from tool to tool, so the formula is the same wherever children meet it. They connect the subject to the object with the verb by hand, and if the pieces don’t connect, the sentence doesn’t work.

The hard part was making that logic carry beyond one kind of verb. The deeper I dug into linguistics, the clearer it became that almost every verb falls into one of four categories:

Going

Verbs that describe movement or change.

Doing

Verbs that describe an action or process.

Having

Verbs that describe possession.

Being

Verbs that describe states of existence.

Each category became a tool, and each tool teaches one relationship:

Going Tool

The subject moving toward or away from the object: the direction of action in a sentence.

Doing Tool

The subject performing an action, and the object changing or reacting in response.

Having Tool

Whether or not the subject has the object.

Being Tool

How the subject moves from one state of being to another, and what happens along the way.

Testing, Development and Supporting Materials

Before designing anything, I looked at how children are actually taught grammar. Alongside Montessori philosophy, I talked to people aged 19–27 about what they remembered of literacy at school in NZ. The pattern was clear: maths used hands-on materials that made lessons stick, while literacy was static, routine and easily forgotten. That set three rules for the project: wood, shapes, and learning led by touch and play.

Two rounds of desirability testing with NZ educators reshaped it, prompting a brand revamp and growing a single prototype into the four-tool system. Bold colours and basic shapes keep the formula consistent across every piece, and the typeface, Andika [2], was chosen because it was designed for beginner readers.

The supporting materials connect play to the curriculum. A classroom guide opens each tool with real-life situations, so students start from their own experience. They match those ideas to the example sentences on the tool, build their own with the sentence-building cards, and lock it in with worksheets matched to each tool.

What Makes It Different

Classrooms are full of flipbooks and flashcards, and even Montessori’s materials stay still: they give each part of speech a symbol, but never show how the parts act on each other. Grammar Gizmos makes movement the teacher. It keeps Montessori’s proven tactile approach and adds the missing layer of motion, so children don’t just see a symbol for a verb, they make it happen. For the nearly two in five students falling behind, that’s a kind of structural clarity paper can’t give.