Teaching Grammar

I sat in the lobby of the music school the other week and heard one man saying , "Me and Bob's studio is almost finished."

I admit I cringed. The ESL teacher in me was quiet.

I am sure we have all laughed at the photos we can easily find online with misspellings and thus changing the whole context. We have seen the missing commas which change the meaning or the modifier in the wrong place changing the meaning.

So for those reasons and a number of others grammar is important in our schooling.

Here are some things that are important to us:

Diagramming - honestly I don't think I did diagramming until I was in graduate school and taking a syntax class. My husband said that he was learning how to diagram while learning Greek when he was in seminary. He wished he had learned diagramming earlier. Given that background we felt that a curriculum that taught diagramming was important.

I wanted something that taught the basics and would make it easy for me to stress memory work.

A year ago I purchased Analytical Grammar. I like the concept of 12 weeks of teaching and then some time reviewing. Admittedly it took us longer than 12 weeks to teach through it and then we did the review. We had finished the First Season before we came west and so I bought the Reinforcement and Review.  Well, the Second and Third season are in the lime green notebooks in a box and we could not get them for the beginning of the year. That is part of the waiting for the visa.

I found Our Mother Tongue in the local homeschool store and bought that to use for review. I really like the simpleness of the book. We usually sit down and read a chapter twice a week.

I have Analytical Grammar Junior Mechanics and we are going through that this year. Someone gave me an Easy Grammar book which I have not yet used. I might pull some pages from there to use as review.

As I mentioned, I wanted something that stressed or fit with a memory work program. I did purchase Memoria Press's English Grammar Recitation. That works with our other programs as I quiz him. I am mainly looking for an answer that is close. I do not require the exact words but want to make sure he knows the meaning.

At this point the most grammar that Miss K is getting is building sentences with her DK Silly Sentences.

I heard her asking for a noun and wanting a period. She is also learning that a sentence, sentence must have five little things -- a noun, a verb, a capital letter, an end mark, and make sentence. (We used Shurley Grammar for a year.)

I think Bob was also getting into this. He made some sentences.

That wraps up some of our thoughts about grammar. I am writing this because it helps me to think through some of the reasons we have chosen what we are using. This is one of the posts that I checked and checked again hoping that I didn't have a spelling error or grammar mistake.

What have you used for grammar?


Beth