Analytical Grammar? Simply Grammar? Something else?

Sara, I don’t know that it will meet your desire for a CM grammar, but we are using Growing with Grammar.  It was specifically designed to be self-teaching, which is why I chose it.  We are doing grammar 3x per week.  They spend approx 10-12 minutes per lesson working independently, and I might spend 10 minutes per week with them either sitting and watching during one of their sessions or doing an extra explanation.  For each year/grade the program comes with a STUDENT manual (TRULY written for the student and makes grammar absolutely simple, by grade, in bite size chunks, 10 minute lessons at most), and then a student workbook for each year.  This program will not “give” your children grammar in ONE year, as AG can do, but if you use it over the course of grade 5-8, you child will be complete for grammar knowledge going into high school.   My boys are doing well, finding it painless, and I intend to stick with it.  (note we did not start until 5th grade) 

Warning:  The program does require a bit of showing the “wrong” punctuation/student is to correct, but this aspect is fairly minimal (perhaps one such exercise every 7th lesson?)  To be honest, my boys are finding that method – correcting “the wrong” – to be quite effective.  (please don’t throw stones!)  I know doing grammar this way is considered “risky” in CM terms, but I went for GWG anyway primarily because I so much wanted an independent program, and again, because those exercises (correcting the wrong) are relatively few in the grand scheme of the program.  Perhaps it’s because my boys are such avid readers that it’s very obvious to them when a sentence exercise or spelling treatment is shown incorrectly in the grammar workbook.  Instead of “the incorrect” being trapped in their mind’s eye, they are seeing it as reinforcement of what is wrong and we can get a solid reminder of the correct sentence treatment.

HTH, Sara.  Blessings,  Angie

Sara, I’ve used AG and JAG this year with two groups of kids. Both are very independent in my opinion. In class, we read over the notes together and worked the first exercise page together, the rest was independent. Honestly my dd13 could do it all independently. AG offers a DVD to help with this, but it just does the same – read through the notes and work through some examples. After teaching both AG and JAG, I would suggest one of three things to shorten the AG exercises a bit.

1 – Cut the number from 10 to 7 or

2- Draw out a few blank diagrams for some of the exercises. 

3- Do the parsing one day and the diagramming the next. This will make the 10 weeks of lessons take 20, but it would work. 

I can’t give a review of Simply Grammar as it’s been years since I’ve seen it, but hopefully that helps a bit on the AG side.

Blessings,

Christie