Need advice on Formal Grammer and spelling.

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  • August 3, 2015 at 8:01 pm
    jill smith
    Participant

    HELP! What age do you start formal grammar and spelling. We just recently purchased Abeka 1st and 3rd  grade Language Arts. Wow! What they need to do in 1st grade just blows my mind. For example: Write the best sentence on the line. Divide words into syllables. ect. Is this to much for my DD age 7? Then for my DD age 10 I picked up the 3rd grade book because it looked much simpler, well, not so much. Here is an example: Write a declarative sentence about your family.  Write and Interrogative sentence about a book in the Bible. As we move on into the middle of the book they want them to underline the subject and /verb ect.  What do you all think for my girls? Should I do simpler? Any suggestions? I certainly don’t want to push to fast , but don’t want them to be behind as well. I am so confused on what I should do this year with them. Does anyone have a break down of their schedule for their kids? Same ages or close would be awesome. Thanks.

    August 4, 2015 at 10:01 am
    Tristan
    Participant

    Formal grammar we save for middle or high school.  The only thing we do before then is introduce the basic terms for noun/verb/etc. using the World of Language picture books by Ruth Heller.  We only do that because we take standardized testing each year (state requirement) and it’s on there beginning with 1st or 2nd grade.

    Spelling – We’ve done a mix.  One child used All About Spelling for about 2 years and it was okay.  What we’ve found works best for us is to relax about it.  We pick up Spelling Wisdom (from SCM) beginning around 3rd/4th grade for a child, they use is slowly as a combination copywork/spelling/looking at punctuation/prepared dictation.  And they just keep working through that over the years.  I have some kids who are more visual/natural spellers and others who are not.  I’ve also seen that for my later to read independently kids spelling tends to take longer to pick up simply because they haven’t been exposed to the volume of written print that a child who started reading two years or more earlier than they did would have.

    Another key for me – if it bothers the child that they have trouble spelling – then we work on it specifically using their own writing and words they tend to misspell.

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