Ruth Beechick discusses this issue clearly & concisely in the Writing section of her book The Three R’s. Her methods & theories seem very CM compatible. She recommends waiting until 7th grade to teach much grammar beyong the mechanics of punctuation & capitalization.
She says, “Teaching of the grammar parts has been researched extensively. If you tested any group of children to find out who knows a lot of grammar and who knows only a little grammar, you would find that the grammar scores do not correlate with quality of writing. Children who know a lot of grammar are not necessarily better writers. The parts do not add up to the desired whole.
“But moving in the opposite direction does work. That is, students who are good writers can learn grammar better than students who are poor writers. Grammar is not a way to good writing; it is a tool that good writers use to analyze writing, to justify doing something this way instead of that way, and so forth.”
Later she says, “When your child studies from a workbook or textbook in which parts chosen by a curriculum planner are laid out in some kind of order, it is inevitable that the child will meet parts he already knows or parts he cannot yet understand. It is also inevitable that he will learn some matters that he does not yet need in his writing, so he will forget them. When your child learns any part because he needs it to get his dictation correct, the learning is stronger.”
That made a lot of sense to me. I highly recommend her book to anyone homeschooling early elementary. It is a short read (120 pages), but packed full of great guidance and information.
maynegirl
