On grammar: If you think of it as a grab-bag of disparate and often nonsensical rules, you don't know grammar. Give students the tools to make sense of this wondrous phenomenon, LANGUAGE. So, it's not just that a word as used in a sentence is a certain part of speech. In English, phrases and clauses also act as parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on.

That's how to make sense of a sentence like Milton's first, in Paradise Lost.  It's the characteristic of self-similarity, the larger blocks that act as the smaller blocks do, and which are made up of smaller blocks, down to the fundamental "atom" of the word or irreducible phrase.  Thus a noun phrase may be part of an adjective clause that is itself part of a noun clause, the subject or the object of a sentence.

Show kids how the blocks are put together.  Then hint also that in other languages, words or alterations on words are used to signal what it takes us a whole phrase to get across, and vice versa.  OPEN TO THEM THE WORLD OF HUMAN LANGUAGE.  Will it fascinate everybody?  Heck no.  Will it fascinate some?  Absolutely.  Will it help everybody make sense of English?  Yes, it will.