I hate "Grammar"…

Misty, perhaps you could ask your husband or another adult (a friend, relative, or maybe a college-student neighbor?) to “check” your children’s grammar work once or twice a week just to see if everything looks okay. If someone looked at my child’s exercises and told me, “They missed just a couple of things, but it seems like they’ve got it,” I would be satisfied that they were learning the concepts and just move on. If they are not getting it or have too many questions for you during the lessons, then probably a tutor would be a good idea.

If you think your kids need a little extra help, here is a link to a grammar website that was sent to me earlier this week. It is a site that is selling grammar materials, but this page is FREE for use, and I think there are other things you can access at no cost as well.

HTH,

Sue

I agree with Wendy.  The goal is communicating well, either by the spoken or written word.  Incidentally, my son who used Easy Grammar  for two years is now getting a master’s degree in writing and freely admits that the only formal grammar he knows is what I taught him.  He’s going to be a famous author some day — watch for him!  🙂  

OK.  Grammar isn’t some big scary stuff made up by academicians to make kids miserable.  Really.  (OK, a few Latin scholars got into the program in the nineteenth century and messed with the works–we are excluding them.  They didn’t play well with others, and they are to blame for the stupid “no split infinitive” rule.  They have to sit in the corner.)

Grammar simply means the rules we apply to our words so that we can make sense to each other.  No rules, no sense.  We would not be able to understand each other.  ALL of us have some degree of intuitive understanding of the rules.  So most of us can get along with varying degrees of success with little or no formal grammar study.  Some can do quite well indeed. 

However, I have never worked closely with anyone whose writing could not have been improved by a little additional grammar understanding.  (Don’t worry, I don’t mean anyone here.  I consider the forum almost a verbal area–like we are having conversations.  I am talking about students and writers.)  There is an epidemic in modern writing–an epidemic of misunderstanding.  And I don’t mean breaking fussy old rules like the split infinitive rule.  I mean basic clarity–like having dangling participles.  Subjects and verbs that do not agree.  Unclear antecedents.  Clauses tacked on any old place with no sense of the best sound or sense.  This is what I find in PROFESSIONAL writing like nationally syndicated columns and best-sellers.  And this is just a start!

I am not a years-and-years-of-grammar person myself.  But I do teach one good solid course in junior high.  I find it imperative for budding writers to avoid the problems I mentioned above.  And also, for the college-bound, who must study foreign languages—knowing the rules of your OWN language makes it infinitely easier to understand the rules of another.  In fact, at first, for most of us learning languages as teens or adults (since most of us do not learn by total immersion) it is nearly impossible to learn foreign languages if we can’t comprehend things in our own like verb tenses and agreement.  A lot of the grammar I DO remember is the result of spending many years learning French and Latin and Spanish. 

And, in fact, knowing grammar makes me a better reader, and therefore better able to make sense of the ideas of OTHERS as well as being better able to communicate my own ideas.  I have OFTEN when writing a passage, decided my awkward phrasing was the result of my not communicating clearly enough what I want to say–and very often, grammar has helped me to get out of the difficulty.  I regularly diagram sentences that I can’t make work so that I can see why I am having trouble and fix the problem.  It almost always works.  And in fact, just last week I was struggling with a scripture passage, knowing that I was missing something in it and not knowing what it was.  After diagramming the passage, I discovered I was incorrectly understanding the antecedents of some pronouns and studying the passage grammatically helped me understand it better.  Now, since I am not going to accuse the Author of scripture with incorrect grammar (although assuredly He must work through imperfect languages and messengers!) the problem was with myself, and my grammatical understanding solved the problem.

In short, I think grammar is extraordinarily useful to anyone who is not already a perfect communicator.  Since I have never yet met one of those on earth, I think some understanding is useful to us all.  The amount may vary, certainly.  But grammar rules are like a “user’s manual” for our language.  In my 40something years, I’ve nearly always been glad when I made use of the user’s manual.    So, three cheers for grammar from this little corner of the world.

I’m just wanting to clarify. I was not advocating not teaching grammar. I am not advocating teaching a different “level” of grammar based on a child’s aptitude.

I was suggesting determining a set of goals for teaching grammar to evaluate resources. Usually the goal is not the ability to complete fill-in-the-blank type exercises. My goal is for the child to understand the “user manual” for our language so they have the ability to write clearly.  Many different resources can meet this goal.

Well, it is a REALLY  hard step to do!  My boys have struggled with this as well.  I think girls get extra verbal genes or something.  LOL  It takes time and work.  And none of mine could write worth ANYTHING before at least 11, and did not care much about grammar until we were well into Latin. 

Wendy, I never thought you wanted NO grammar.  I just wanted to  give it a plug since it seems to get a bad name sometimes.  Misty needs some more programs to check out; could you share with her some resources that might help her meet her goals?  Someone has suggested Easy Grammar to check out; what worked for my boys (Our Mother Tongue) has not worked well for her or for her son.  Her son is a good and observant kid; my suspicion is he  needs things explained fairly concretely with minimum abstraction, and Misty is a great and intelligent mom who feels she needs extra support in this area, so good teacher resources are a must.  Suggestions?

I used Jensen’s Grammar followed by Jensen’s Punctuation. These move fairly quickly so might not be a good option. These are the resources that I worked through with my older kids. I followed this up with Daily Grams for review.

I know many who swear by Easy Grammar. I believe that is the program that has you memorize all the prepositions first, correct?

Winston Grammar is not a resource that I could wrap my head around, but I know several people who have used it with success.

Shurley Grammar? I know it exist and uses jingles.  

 A rather unorthodox option could be First Language Lessons 3&4 or just 4. The instructor text is completely scripted for a novice teacher. The examples are very clear and easy to understand. Although this would not be equilavent to a highschool level course, by the end of the 2nd book the child and teacher would understand all the concepts covered. This could potentially make a HS level grammar course less threatening. Just a thought.

Thanks Wendy! Very refreshing comments!

I agree with Lindsey too — we are never going to be experts at everything and teaching our children that fact then showing them where/how to seek out instruction is a great tool they will use forever.  

Obviously a basic understanding of grammar is desirable and I found the example of dissecting sentences in Scripture interesting.  I don’t think anyone would say excellent grammar understanding = great writers.  I live in the South, which is not particularly known for its beautiful mastery of perfect grammar but is known for its incredibly rich contribution to American literature.  Communicating effectively takes many paths.  Sometimes the most proper is the least interesting!  

In our experience great readers tend to be strong writers so read, read, read!