Most people already do this but just to say it anyway.
When I do pop-up grammar in R & D or in Reading Option A, if it’s a verb, referring to the ending of the verb, I ask the class:
What does (ending on the verb) mean?
When they respond with the corresponding subject pronoun, I say, “That’s correct! _____ means _____.”
So if it says “We want” in French, it’s “Nous voulons”.
So, I ask:
What does “ons” mean?
They respond, “We”. I say, “That’s correct! “ons” means “we”.
Sometimes I add, “That’s because “ons” goes with “we”.
It’s odd for me, a grammarian, to do this, but this kind of explanation of grammar, where we do the explanation in less than four seconds, makes sense to the kids. It is odd to me but is the only thing they can grasp.
If I said, “This irregular verb form is part of this boot verb. Here let me write the whole verb out (because I am smart and I know it and you don’t know many irregular verbs at all do you you little losers but I do because I am smart and we need to test you on this on Friday don’t we?). Notice that the subject pronoun is in first person plural form.” This simply does not work for the vast majority of kids.
Using grammar terms in this old way is a complete fail. Notice the hydra headed ego involved here, as if our goal is to exalt our own knowledge and on some level use words that keep good hearted kids in the dark by making them learn (read memorize) stuff that is extremely unpleasant and unwieldy and not at all in the arena of sound, but wedged in the left hemisphere of the brain and therefore useless unless our kids will one day walk around France with a small whiteboard and a marker to communicate with the French people.
But the way we train them this way, when they read “ons” on the end of a verb, their minds are trained to go right to the “we” subject pronoun, which is what we want them to do, to know that “ons” goes with “we” and so on.
The key to this is for the kids to get the expression “This GOES WITH this” as in “ons goes with nous.” That is what they can understand and that is therefore the terminology we must use. We don’t use terms they can’t understand.
When Anne Matava, never, not once, having conjugated a verb on the board for her fourth year Hogs in the previous three years, the famous Hogs, all now in college, one of them (the Dancer, I think) said, “Oh, Frau Matava, thank you for the neat filing system.”
The kid knew every verb form from almost four years of constant German stories, and so when she saw them in a verb conjugation chart, she thought it was a clever filing system and it struck her fancy as something “neat”.
She completely knew all the information in it, so the filing system, of course, wasn’t necessary, but to this student it was kind of cute. Just the opposite happens when students are made to memorize the filing system but can’t actually use the verbs for shit in speech.
To simplify: when we do pop up grammar, we only use the terms “means” and “goes with”. The kids get that.