Winging it with grammar--suggestions?

[Haiku]

Five years of grammar instruction for the boy have amounted to no understanding of grammar. I think Winston looks good, but before I invest in (yet another) grammar curriculum, I'm just going to wing it for a while. I bought some Mad Libs and found some online games.

 

What are your favorite non-curriculum grammar resources? This is for a 12 year old who still struggles to identify nouns and verbs in a sentence.

[Matryoshka]

Before we started with formal grammar (which I think was around 5th grade for my older two) it was pretty much Grammar Rock and Mad Libs...

[EKS]

Have you tried MCT? It worked with my dyslexic son who had no understanding of grammar after several years of traditional instruction.

[Mrs. Y]

School House Rock has free YouTube's. They are the original, old fashioned ones I watched as a child. The one about Mr. Morton is really cute. Then there is: Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

 

There are more.

 

I remember playing around with Mad Libs as a child. :)

Edited January 11, 2016 by Colleen OH

[HomeAgain]

Grammar Land. It's old, but free, and they like putting the parts of speech on trial.

[Matryoshka]

Have you tried MCT? It worked with my dyslexic son who had no understanding of grammar after several years of traditional instruction.

MCT is awesome if you haven't tried it yet.

[u2006kids]

Cozy grammar. Worked well for us

 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G870A using Tapatalk

[TeaCookiesBears]

I am using WG basic this year and it seems to be working well for us. I used FLL1-2 also.

So, here is what has and is helping dd now.

 

1. I took all the POS and definitions and created a match the words to the definitions. I have her do it 1-2x wk.

 

2. We Listen to Grammar Land Audio from Librivox and Discuss it.

 

3. All the POS have personalities or are clothes/accessories ( got the idea from GrammarLand). For Ex. I will say to dd I am a noun and need to accessorize what do I need to make my outfit look better and she'll tell me Adjective. For boys I use swords guns knights etc.We do this 1-3x wk. This is dd favorite.

 

4. This new but I will start using DK Silly sentences to play a grammar gold fish game.

 

5. I have dd recite pronoun and verbs listed from FLL 2x or more weekly because for some reason pronouns all ways seem to trip her up. WG has some the pronouns listed on the back so this has been helpful in Latin also.

 

ETA: My older dd likes to do these activities with us also because it helps her remember her basics. Often I have her remember/recite what questions do the POS answer.

Edited January 11, 2016 by TeaCookiesBears

[Kuovonne]

Treasured Conversations integrates grammar very well.

 

Mad Libs is good, but it only gets him coming up with verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

It is a different skill to recognize the part of speech in the context of a sentence.

 

I find that once we get past identifying parts of speech in the artificial sentences

in most grammar programs, trying to identify parts of speech in real sentences is *much* harder.

 

Here are a few concepts / tricks that I have helped me and my kids.

 

- memorize the forms of the verb "to be"

- memorize the personal pronouns

- memorize the articles & explain that an article is *always* followed by a noun (but adj might be in between)

- memorize the questions that adj and adv answer (which one, how many, what kind, vs. when, where, why, etc.)

- memorize that the subject answers the question "who or what" followed by the complete verb

 

- explain that helping verbs are part of the verb, and memorize the list

- explain that a sentence can have multiple subjects and predicates

- explain that the same word can be a different part of speech depending on the sentence

- explain that verbals exist, and that they look like verbs, but are not acting as verbs in *this* sentence

(I don't expect the kid to understand verbals, but knowing they exist helps when trying to tell if a word is a verb or not.)

 

If you want a list of sentences to parse, KISS grammar has a lot of them.

I don't like the instruction in KISS, and there are too many sentences in each "lesson" to do in one sitting,

but it is a great resource.