Fix It! Grammar

We are currently using it and love it! We hadn’t gotten to it for several weeks, due to busy-ness other priorities, but just today got it back out and I realized how much I believe in this approach to grammar — learning it ‘on the spot’ by using it in editing, etc.

Something to consider, is that Charlotte Mason espoused the idea of a child seeing language used correctly as much as possible. That way they don’t form incorrect patterns in their mind.

Teaching grammar through making corrections is a popular technique, but it is somewhat the opposite of a CM approach.

Aha — the information you shared, Doug, is interesting! I had not considered that before!

I will say that what we have done in Fix It so far has been looking at a piece of quality literature (Robin Hood, in our case) sentence by sentence. There is nothing incorrect grammatically, except for punctuation. The rest of the lesson is labeling the parts of speech that the student has learned so far, including clauses, etc.

It is not editing in such a way that the sentence has to be re-written or re-structured. It is more editing for recognition of the parts of speech and marking those above the words, and then writing in the commas, capitals, indents for paragraphs, etc.

Once corrections have been made and the parent has looked it over and discussed it with the student, the sentence is rewritten on a separate sheet of paper, continuing the story as he/she goes. So by the end of the book, the student has copied the story, sentence by sentence, adding in only the correct punctuation.

So in a sense, that is a copywork component worked into the lesson, which we really like.

We are in the early stages of the curriculum, so I may be incorrect on how this progresses, but my general sense of it is that grammatically, the piece we work with will always be correct (sans punctuation), and we are only labeling parts of speech as we go, adding in new concepts periodically.

At this point, it is more ‘recognition’ and not so much ‘correction’, as there is nothing wrong with the piece, other than the aforementioned commas, periods, etc.

Hope that makes sense!