Can't upload photos on my iPad, but Middle Girl dressed as Harlequin, and whenever asked about her costume, struck a pose and announced, "Io sono Arlecchino!" She was enchanted when one neighbor replied,"Ah, che bella Arlecchina!" Wee Girl dressed as a leopard. She decided she wasn't interested in a separate costume for our parish's All Saints dress-up, so she is going to be from the Bible story of Christ and the Ten Leopards. She is the grateful leopard who turned back.

floridamom, Definitely read it, group or not. I'm not persuaded that it needs to, or even should be, read with annotations or discussion the first time.

Reading The Arabian Nights and The Divine Comedy, still. Why do I keep picking up huge books to read? Our used bookstore has a complete set of Decline and Fall in new condition for $18, and I was actually fingering a volume and thinking, "Hm, only 3,600 pages in all; I bet I could do that." And the little girls have been demanding extensive evening read-aloud time; as soon as I finish reading to one, the other demands Mommy. So I get to the end of the evening hoarse, exhausted, and just wanting to watch Columbo reruns on Netflix instead of reading to myself. If only I can get them through an entire book, I'll at least be able to count the read-alouds. Does anyone else deal with children who feel that Mommy's reading time is wasted if she's reading to herself? Read "The Monkey's Paw" to Middle Girl this evening. She actually shivered in delighted terror. And now there's a thunderstorm brewing, and it will be my own fault if she's in my bed tonight.

Welcoming input from biologists of any kind here. I'm considering using the Bio text with Middle Girl in the near future. Data points: 1. We already have it; I bought it for Great Girl for the microscope and dissection work, because I have very little biology background and no experience in hands-on bio. Back then there really wasn't anything else I was able to find for these areas. So, free. Except for ordering more critters to dissect. 2. We are non-creationist, non-ID, completely teaching evolution; we used with Great Girl, and will use with Middle Girl, a British general science text with a thorough (as far as I can tell) bio component that teaches evolution straightforwardly (unlike the secular American texts I looked at, which make a big deal about how we really really know evolution to be true; I prefer to just have it taken for granted.) 3. We've been using TOPS up to now, which has some nice bio-related units, but no microscope or dissection work. I tried BFSU, I really did; but I had a really hard time using it, and often enough understanding the concepts myself. TOPS has gone much better. 4. We'd just be using those sections of Apologia. 5. Great Girl went ahead and read all the parts I wasn't going to have her read, with no ill effects. She spent the summer doing evolution-related research with a biology professor, in fact. For what that's worth. If people better understanding biology than I think we still shouldn't use it, what else is out there for bio lab work?

Sorry to take so long to get back to you. Dh and I thought this was a good question, that wasn't as easy to answer as it seemed. Some scattered thoughts: Think of grammar as being like the rules of any other field of study. The rules aren't determined by what authority or era one likes best, but rather discovered, and to a certain point not subject to argument, even if in some cases linguists differ about what rules best account for some particular case. One of the differences from traditional grammar I mentioned in an earlier post was the abandonment of categorizing words into a small number of parts of speech according to their meaning. Dh adds that a fundamental error of homeschool grammar texts is this very emphasis on the individual word, where a sentence is understood by first examining the individual words. Instead, the sentence should be understood as the basic unit of language, and analyzed in its constituent parts and their relation to each other. As a practical matter, students should be doing less memorizing of rules and concelts and lists of words that make up the categories of various parts of speech, and more analyzing their intuitions about language. To advert to a different thread, if you know how (say) a typical adjective behaves in different kinds of sentences and phrases, you can decide if a word is behaving like an adjective by seeing to what extent it behaves like one, rather than memorizing the definition of an adjective, examining the meaning of the word, and then making a judgment as to whether the word meets the definition. Because a child doesn't already know the abstract concept of "describes or limits a person, place, thing or idea"; but he already knows that you can generally put -ly on the end of the words that go in front of nouns, and then put the word after the verb ("the green light shines greenly"). Because he already does this. Learning linguistic rules is not memorization of abstract concepts, but paying attention to the complex things the child already knows how to do with the language. ETA: It's very late and I hope the above wasn't just unclear babbling.

Thanks to dh, and Stacia, here it is: the Old Story of Catholic Guilt, in book spine format.

It made perfect sense to me. :)

I developed the habit in college of using an index card as a bookmark, and jotting down notes, page numbers, paper ideas.... I would also write the bibliographic information on the card so I wouldn't have to hunt that down later. If I wanted a long quote I xeroxed the page(s), stuck them in the back, and stapled them to the card when I was done with the book. Now I still use an index card bookmark, but just write notes and page numbers. If you like your notes, just put the card in the front cover of the book before you shelve it.

ElizaGrace, Thanks to your tip, I tracked down one of the structural grammar texts they tried out in high schools, this one in 1959 (article here: http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_196202_link.pdf ), and dh is going to swing by the university library to check out the the copy there. I'll report back!

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language prefers adjective; but they also don't think there's a lot invested in the adverb-vs-adjective question there.

Interesting. I'll have to have a look at it.

Whoa! I am so going to look into this. We actually have an old New Math book, from when they were trying to teach set theory to first-graders, with awesome Yellow Submarine-style pictures. I volunteer you to write the educational history of the Seventies.

A fundamental difference is that linguists understand grammar to be the rules governing language as actually spoken by native speakers, whereas traditional grammar understands it as a set of rules that ought to govern written and spoken language, without regard to the extent to which those rules are observed by native speakers. Traditional grammar emphasizes categorization of words into a limited number of "parts of speech," primarily by examining the meaning of the word and determining if that meaning causes it to fall into one category or another. Linguists look instead at the grammatical properties, not the meaning of words and phrases. An argument for this approach is that this is, in fact, how native speakers identify words and phrases. When Lewis Carroll tells us "all mimsy were the borogoves," we know mimsy to be an adjective and borogove to be a noun, without knowing whether the latter is a person, place, or thing, or whether mimsy describes it. We do this by intuitively understanding how the placement of the words in the phrase works, and by recognizing the -y and -s endings of the words. A modern grammatical approach thus takes advantage of the grammatical knowledge already present in a native speaker's mind, rather than requiring memorization of rules and comprehension of abstract categories. Dh would recommend reading one of the introductions to grammar for the nonspecialist available, and teaching from that. Unfortunately nothing as far as I know has ever been written for the pre-college level. Unfortunately, he's all busy writing a book on conditionals, which I understand even less than I understand anaphora. Progress on the dissertation was hugely accelerated by the sudden discovery that Great Girl was on the way and likely to be expensive. Don't know if I'm willing to go to those lengths again! :D

I didn't say anyone was arguing not to study grammar. I'm sorry that I was unclear. The discussion seemed to be, in part, the purpose of studying grammar, with quite a bit of discussion about whether it ought to be studied in order to improve writing. I was putting forth the case for studying it for its own sake. I beg to differ that those who study grammar for a living - chiefly linguists, analytic philosophers, and their sort - aren't ignored by most homeschoolers. But that was something of a rabbit trail, and I'm happy to withdraw the comment. First graders do indeed study germ theory, astronomy, etc.: in an age-appropriate manner. You start with the solar system, why you wash your hands before eating, etc. Likewise, I've never had any problems beginning grammar at a young age. They hear Mommy or Daddy or Big Sister referring to a noun; they ask, What's a noun; they get told: Nouns are the thing-words that you can count; we add -s to the words to show there's more than one.

The problem with resorting to the definition of "prime" is that kids then want to know WHY that's the definition of prime. It seems so arbitrary. With my own kids, and kids on our math team, I show them how to make a factor tree, and let them experiment with branching down using 1. They quickly discover that the tree branches infinitely, you never get down to a useful "bottom of the tree" (prime) number, and you're forced to rule that one doesn't count. So if you asked one of my kids why 1 isn't a prime, she'd say "because if it were prime, you'd run out of paper."

Knew about him in sixth grade; but he didn't really talk to girls then. Made him talk to me in tenth grade. Ha.

Dh wrote a 1000-page dissertation on pronouns.* His take on grammar is that you study it for the same reason you study math, or astronomy, or poetry, or anatomy. It's part of our world, and you study it so as to understand how it works; not so that you can do something else with it. This is why it annoys him that the mass of homeschoolers stick tenaciously to the traditional understandings of grammar that linguists rejected a century ago. To him, it's as if they refused to learn calculus, or heliocentrism, or literary theory, or germ theory, on the conviction that the old way must be better. If grammar is the set of rules governing our language - and it is - why ignore the people who've devoted their lives to understanding those rules? (I tell him that as soon as the linguists publish an open-and-go curriculum, he may see a different response.) *Sort of. They call them anaphora these days.

After I attached the file, it said "Error You aren't permitted to upload this kind of file" Stupid computers. How I miss my Selectric.

I have a book poem photo, but I am too technically inept to get it into a post. I thought we were supposed to be in the Jetsons world now where I could just have my robot maid do this for me. :( Help.

Sure, if an infinitive marker was two stories tall and could bite your head off. ;)

1. Only if by "function ... as adjectives or as adverbs" you mean "can modify noun phrases or verb phrases." That really doesn't seem sufficient reason to call a prepositional phrase an adjective or an adverb. Because they don't resemble adjectives or adverbs in any other way.2. No, they aren't. No, it's not. It's a prepositional phrase which is modifying a noun phrase. No, it isn't. Let's try to make "from Connecticut" do various adjectivish things. I am fat; he is fatter; they are fattest. *I am from Connecticut; he is from Connecticuter; they are from Connecticutest. *I am from Connecticut; he is more from Connecticut; they are most from Connecticut. (That is the most from Connecticut minivan I've ever seen.) The green light shone greenly. My violent cat growls violently. *The senator from Connecticut slithers from Connecticutly. Proust ate a fat, fluffy, French madeleine. *Proust ate a fat, fluffy, from Connecticut madeleine. My uncle is Polish. My Polish uncle reads Dante. *My goat is from Connecticut. My from Connecticut goat reads Dante. That sonnet is very uneven. Your gills are surprisingly green. *Some corporations are remarkably from Connecticut. I vote Not an adjective.

Yes. For all known Western history, from the days of ancient Greece, it was universal belief that, when there was a choice between tutoring and class teaching, tutoring was self-evidently the better method of education. Only at the beginning of the 20th century was there a mass shift to the opposite belief, that groups of students taught by one teacher was superior to tutoring. Dh and I believed from the outset that two-and-a-half millennia of "this is obvious" beats one century of "wait, we just came up with a better idea."

Possibly that's just evidence for the inadequacy of the traditional diagraming method. Which linguists, in fact, have abandoned entirely as a grammatical tool. Besides, all sorts of things seem to dangle from nouns in the traditional diagram: pronouns, determiners, other nouns... none of which are thereby adjectives. This seems to be strong evidence likewise for the inadequacy of a grammatical method that relies on examining primarily the meaning of a word or phrase, rather than its function in the sentence. So let's look at the function, which is less muddy than looking at the meaning. Both 'below,' in the original example, and 'outside,' in yours, easily take a noun phrase complement. all the stock below all the stock below the haymows the boy outside the boy outside the house This noun phrase complement (or, if we prefer, object) is possible for prepositions, but not for adjectives. *green the house *uncomfortable my fourth glass of whiskey ... and so on. I suppose one could claim that the entire prepositional phrases 'outside the house' and 'below the haymows' would be adjectives; but then we've just created a whole class of adjectives that don't behave like adjectives in any way.

Eliana, I don't know that Bolingbroke's sincerity is as important to Shakespeare (in my head, at least) as the transition from the concept of a king divinely ordained and ruling as a natural course, to the concept of a king ruling through the moral right. A very interesting spot is in Act III: Queen: Gard'ner, for telling me these news of woe, Pray God, the plants thou graft'st may never grow. Gardener: Poor queen, so that thy state might be no worse, I would my skill were subject to thy curse. There's an obvious allusion to Christ's cursing of the fig tree (the Queen is referring to trees); but the gardener observes that her curse cannot be expected to really have an effect. And of course the implied inverse (which Shakespeare could hardly have said explicitly) is that a royal blessing must likewise have no real effect. It was interesting to see how Shakespeare here, and in other places, undercuts the concept of any divinely derived, metaphysical reality attaching to kingship. (Twice, people fail to recognize Bolingbroke, despite his royal blood; completely contrary to literary convention.) Anyhow, all finished, with Richard and Grahame both. The girls decided someone, mostly me, should be Richard II for Hallowe'en, since the thrift store had an appropriate cloak and crown. I'm going to keep a sharp lookout for usurpers; and maybe lower those taxes a bit. (Wee Girl couldn't choose between Titania and an awesome leopard costume, so has combined them and is going to be the Fairy Queen's pet leopard. We'll see what the neighborhood makes of that.) For seasonal reading, I'm going for Dante, as the Commedia covers Oct. 31, Nov. 1, and Nov. 2 all in one. Highs still in the 80s here; frozen in the ice with Satan sounds pretty attractive right now.

To restate some of what's been said above, you can either consider it a preposition that doesn't have an object, or, defining prepositions which wander about object-less to be adverbs, consider it an adverb. That it isn't an adjective is clear from the impossibility of fitting it between the determiner and the noun, the comfiest place for an adjective: *the below stock While adjectives may poetically traverse to the far sides of their nouns, they should always be happy in their rightful spot.