Does it matter that they can tell if it’s a intensive pronoun or a reflexive pronoun? Does it matter if they can identify a gerund or an appositive? I go round and round with this and I just can’t see a good reason that they do. Everyone has it in their curriculum, but in real life, in college, even on the SAT, I just can’t see what good reason there is to sweat over this stuff.
I could not agree more with DawnD. And I have an English degree!!! Seriously, grammar curriculum drives me batty. We have tried Easy Grammar along with DailyGrams. I sold it all. We also tried Learning Language Arts through Lit. While Daily Grams and Easy Grammar was not for us, I felt it had merit. LLATL had no merit as far as I was concerned. PURE busy work. It was LABORIOUS to say the least. My DC loathed LLATL. Now we did keep the Readers that came with the Red Book, and they are great little readers. Other than that, no thanks on LLATL.
We decided to scrap it all until 7th grade for our DC. I do have a basket of Grammar Games I call them. Some are homemade, and some made from things I found every August at the Dollar Tree. Love that place in August. I have a homophone and homonym game I made. I also have a couple of Bingo games for various parts of speech: preposisitions, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives. Each one is separate and the cards are full of examples of those parts of speech. It really helps our children get a handle on the 8 basic parts of speech. I think that is important, but to me, what is far more important, is their ability to write and communicate effectively. I think maturation goes a long way in this.
I use PLL and ILL with our DC, and we skip the lessons that we don’t feel have value or that cover topics we have already mastered or that we cover in other ways (dictation and narration for instance). I also really like the Silly Sentences game by DK. I know it is not CM b/c the sentence might read “The blueberries ate the grapes.” but it engages children and can be played by multiple ages, and it totally helped my 9YO DS solidfiy the 8 basic parts of speech (when nothing else had seemed to work!).
I try to play a grammar game a week with each of them excepting our 13YO son, who is using Rod & Staff Book 7. He will finish it sometime this year, and I have Book 8 on hand, which is the last grammar instruction book they have. After Book 8, Rod & Staff focuses on writing.
I love that Rod & Staff is very cost effective, totally non-consumable (they do have consumable worksheets and test booklets that come with the set, BUT they have told me repeatedly they give families the rights to copy them for us within their immediate family so we do). I can purchase the whole set including a teacher’s manual for less than $30. They are very high-quality, bound hardback books. The Teacher’s book includes the entire student lessons, which makes working alongside my son on the areas he has struggled with so easy.
It is rigorous, but I feel that in 7th grade that is the time to start expecting them to learn diagramming and the more involved and complicated parts of speech. I agree though that to some degree it is all too much. If you can form complex sentences and communitcate effectively, that is the purpose to me of grammar instruction.
This is the Rod & Staff Language Set we have that my son, 13, is using currently. He doesn’t love it, but it is working and it is effective for us. I plan to use it with all of our DC. I paid about $40 for it b/c it was at a convention and they were giving no tax and a 10% discount. Of course I saved shipping by purchasing it and walking away with it. It is religious in content, but if you are a Christ-follower, I don’t think you would find it objectional at all.
http://www.rodandstaffbooks.com/item/1-127–/?list=Rod_and_Staff_Grade_7
HTH, LDIMom
