Grammar

[4KookieKids]

My search feature in my phone is wonky again, so can someone point me to an AL grammar thread?

In particular, ds9 signed up to take the psat 8/9 this year, and it seems to have some grammar on it. So I need something that is streamlined (he just wants to get ‘er done), complete and concise (I really don’t want to have to buy ten different workbooks to get a full grammar course), and explicit (ds has ASD and does not intuit grammar/anything, despite copious reading).

Any ideas?

PS. Preferably something independent... I’ve got three younger kids too. ?

 

[Jackie]

For get ‘er done, I’ve liked the Editor in Chief workbooks. They introduce a grammar rule, give explicit instructions and examples for the rule, then have several paragraphs in which the student finds the errors and corrects them. Every few rules, they have a review lesson  that combines the most recent rules into paragraphs to find the errors. It is straightforward and can be done quickly.

[HomeAgain]

Harvey's Grammar and the accompanying workbook.  It assumes you know nothing about grammar, is short and concise, and gives enough practice to get an overview.

[4KookieKids]

8 hours ago, Jackie said:

For get ‘er done, I’ve liked the Editor in Chief workbooks. They introduce a grammar rule, give explicit instructions and examples for the rule, then have several paragraphs in which the student finds the errors and corrects them. Every few rules, they have a review lesson  that combines the most recent rules into paragraphs to find the errors. It is straightforward and can be done quickly.

 

In my looking, this seems very similar to the Fix-it that everyone raves about, but without the teachers manual. Does that seem about right (if you have any familiarity with fix it)?

[Dmmetler]

If he likes Fred, the LOF Grammar books are super quick and quite explicit. 

 

 

[4KookieKids]

26 minutes ago, dmmetler said:

If he likes Fred, the LOF Grammar books are super quick and quite explicit. 

 

 

He liked Fred when he read a bunch two years ago but then felt that they got boring. He only read through F though.

[Dmmetler]

It may not be the best fit, then. I do not agree with the author that they're high school level, but I do think they'd be a decent way of doing a lot of grammar quickly.

Maybe go through Khan Academy's SAT English prep? It would be more than the PSAT 8/9 requires, but would be a similar format.

[4KookieKids]

23 minutes ago, dmmetler said:

It may not be the best fit, then. I do not agree with the author that they're high school level, but I do think they'd be a decent way of doing a lot of grammar quickly.

Maybe go through Khan Academy's SAT English prep? It would be more than the PSAT 8/9 requires, but would be a similar format.

 

I was considering this. It has the perk of being free. I just wasn’t sure if it started from zero or not. He’s not at a zero, per se, because he’s done some basic grammar in German. But it’s very basic. ?

[Jackie]

13 hours ago, 4KookieKids said:

 

In my looking, this seems very similar to the Fix-it that everyone raves about, but without the teachers manual. Does that seem about right (if you have any familiarity with fix it)?

 

I’m only vaguely familiar with Fix It. As far as I understand, they’re similar in that they use a “student edits the errors” approach. IIRC, Fix It is just elementary, whereas EIC goes up quite a bit higher. Fix It is also meant to be ~10 minutes a day for a school year, I think, whereas EIC is simply less work than that. But again, I’ve never seen Fix It, just heard people talking about using it.

[4KookieKids]

2 hours ago, Jackie said:

 

I’m only vaguely familiar with Fix It. As far as I understand, they’re similar in that they use a “student edits the errors” approach. IIRC, Fix It is just elementary, whereas EIC goes up quite a bit higher. Fix It is also meant to be ~10 minutes a day for a school year, I think, whereas EIC is simply less work than that. But again, I’ve never seen Fix It, just heard people talking about using it.

Oh good to know that EIC will be more streamlined! It's hard to tell from tiny little sample pages! lol. Also interesting to note that Fix It is considered elementary. On their website, they certainly claim that it goes through high school level grammar. ? But I suppose that depends on your student, huh?

Thank you very much!

[Jackie]

14 hours ago, 4KookieKids said:

Oh good to know that EIC will be more streamlined! It's hard to tell from tiny little sample pages! lol. Also interesting to note that Fix It is considered elementary. On their website, they certainly claim that it goes through high school level grammar. ? But I suppose that depends on your student, huh?

Thank you very much!

 

It might also depend on my memory, lol. Everyone I know using Fix It uses it with elementary kids, so maybe I just forgot it went higher. 

[Cake and Pi]

Fix It is not just for elementary. Fix It level 1 is meant for 4th grade and pretty well lines up with MCT Island by the end.  Fix It level 2 is for 5th grade and felt more complicated than MCT Town, but I'm not really sure if it's actually got more to it or if it just confused me because it wasn't as streamlined as the MCT grammar I was used to. (For example, Fix It has main clauses and opening clauses and dependent clauses and who-which clauses and adverb clauses whereas MCT just has independent and dependent clauses.)  I haven't looked through the higher levels of Fix It, but they skip some grades.  So, for example, Fix It book 3 is for 7th grade and book 5 is for 10th grade.  From the online samples, it seems like they get more heavy on editing while maybe not adding a whole lot more grammar?  Hopefully someone with experience with those higher levels will chime in.

Fix It seems pretty explicit, teaches in baby-steps (very part-to-whole), and has the added bonus of built-in copywork.  It's sort of independent.  Kid can easily mark up the day's sentence alone, but then you have to go over it with him and check it, discuss it, etc. 

My homeschooled boys both loved Fix It 1, but then DS#3 asked not to do Fix It 2 when he saw it and DS#1 only got part way into it before declaring the story to be stupid and refusing to do more. *shrug*

Edited October 13, 2018 by Cake and Pi

[SoCal_Bear]

We did Jr. Analytical Grammar. We finished it within 2 months. It's super quick and thorough.

Edited October 13, 2018 by calbear

[4KookieKids]

On 10/12/2018 at 11:15 PM, Cake and Pi said:

Fix It is not just for elementary. Fix It level 1 is meant for 4th grade and pretty well lines up with MCT Island by the end.  Fix It level 2 is for 5th grade and felt more complicated than MCT Town, but I'm not really sure if it's actually got more to it or if it just confused me because it wasn't as streamlined as the MCT grammar I was used to. (For example, Fix It has main clauses and opening clauses and dependent clauses and who-which clauses and adverb clauses whereas MCT just has independent and dependent clauses.)  I haven't looked through the higher levels of Fix It, but they skip some grades.  So, for example, Fix It book 3 is for 7th grade and book 5 is for 10th grade.  From the online samples, it seems like they get more heavy on editing while maybe not adding a whole lot more grammar?  Hopefully someone with experience with those higher levels will chime in.

Fix It seems pretty explicit, teaches in baby-steps (very part-to-whole), and has the added bonus of built-in copywork.  It's sort of independent.  Kid can easily mark up the day's sentence alone, but then you have to go over it with him and check it, discuss it, etc. 

My homeschooled boys both loved Fix It 1, but then DS#3 asked not to do Fix It 2 when he saw it and DS#1 only got part way into it before declaring the story to be stupid and refusing to do more. *shrug*

 

Good informationa. Thank you very much!

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

On 10/13/2018 at 12:15 PM, Cake and Pi said:

Fix It is not just for elementary. Fix It level 1 is meant for 4th grade and pretty well lines up with MCT Island by the end.  Fix It level 2 is for 5th grade and felt more complicated than MCT Town, but I'm not really sure if it's actually got more to it or if it just confused me because it wasn't as streamlined as the MCT grammar I was used to.

Fix It seems pretty explicit, teaches in baby-steps (very part-to-whole), and has the added bonus of built-in copywork.  

 

Would you recommend Fix It 1 between Island & Town, then? Is it fairly comprehensive? DS has loved Island, but it looks like we’ll complete it this year (original plan was to stretch it into 2yrs). I doubt he’d be ready for Town next autumn; I’ve heard it’s a significant jump. I’d have to supplement Poetics & Latin, of course, but that’d be fairly straightforward at this level. 

[Cake and Pi]

8 hours ago, Expat_Mama_Shelli said:

 

Would you recommend Fix It 1 between Island & Town, then? Is it fairly comprehensive? DS has loved Island, but it looks like we’ll complete it this year (original plan was to stretch it into 2yrs). I doubt he’d be ready for Town next autumn; I’ve heard it’s a significant jump. I’d have to supplement Poetics & Latin, of course, but that’d be fairly straightforward at this level. 

 

It depends on what your goals are? Not if you're hoping he'll learn some grammar. Yes if you want quality copywork, practice with dictionary skills and basic punctuation and capitalization, and some review of grammar. The end-points for MCT Island and Fix It 1 are about the same, but MCT teaches everything all at the beginning whereas Fix It is pretty incremental, starting (veeeery) slowly and building over the course of the year. I wouldn't call Fix It comprehensive. It's just looking closely at one sentence from a story each day. The student finds and marks some grammar concepts in the day's sentence, corrects some mechanical errors, looks up a bolded vocab word, and then copies the sentence correctly into a notebook with the previous days' sentences. That's all there is. It's a quick 15 minute exercise.

DS#3 started Fix It 1 and MCT Island about the same time and was approximately half way through Fix It 1 when he finished MCT Island, except for the Mud Trilogy and Practice Island, at roughly the half-way point in our school year. He got a little tired of Fix It near the end, but his writing skills greatly improved while using it.

DS#1 did Fix It 1 and 2 at double-pace while doing MCT Town. He learned a bit of grammar in Fix It 2, but really the whole reason I bought Fix It was so that he could practice finding and correcting mistakes in something interesting that someone else had written. He desperately needed to practice these skills but got very emotional if I asked him to find or correct mistakes in his own writing.

[Shoes+Ships+SealingWax]

20 hours ago, Cake and Pi said:

It depends on what your goals are? Not if you're hoping he'll learn some grammar. Yes if you want quality copywork, practice with dictionary skills and basic punctuation and capitalization, and some review of grammar. The end-points for MCT Island and Fix It 1 are about the same, but MCT teaches everything all at the beginning whereas Fix It is pretty incremental, starting (veeeery) slowly and building over the course of the year. I wouldn't call Fix It comprehensive. It's just looking closely at one sentence from a story each day. The student finds and marks some grammar concepts in the day's sentence, corrects some mechanical errors, looks up a bolded vocab word, and then copies the sentence correctly into a notebook with the previous days' sentences. That's all there is. It's a quick 15 minute exercise.

I’m not entirely sure what my goals are, to be honest... I suppose mainly it’s to give him some time to mature before MCT Town, while still exercising his grammar / mechanics muscles in the meantime. We’ve already incorporated dictionary skills into history, but I’m fine with doubling that up. LOE had him editing some sentences at the end of Foundations & he really enjoyed finding the errors. I’m thinking maybe a sentence a day from each Fix It & Practice Island... perhaps paired with a weekly writing assignment focused on creating quality sentences? I don’t want to jump to paragraphs too soon. 

[Cake and Pi]

7 hours ago, Expat_Mama_Shelli said:

I’m not entirely sure what my goals are, to be honest... I suppose mainly it’s to give him some time to mature before MCT Town, while still exercising his grammar / mechanics muscles in the meantime. We’ve already incorporated dictionary skills into history, but I’m fine with doubling that up. LOE had him editing some sentences at the end of Foundations & he really enjoyed finding the errors. I’m thinking maybe a sentence a day from each Fix It & Practice Island... perhaps paired with a weekly writing assignment focused on creating quality sentences? I don’t want to jump to paragraphs too soon. 

 

It seems like Fix It could work well for your purposes. 

I'm getting a little off topic now, but Killgallons' Elementary Sentence Composing and/or Story Grammar might also work to fill the gap between MCT Island and Town. DS#3 worked out of Killgallons this summer while I waited on him to mature for MCT Town, and I think I'll pull it out again this winter to fill the time between W&R Narrative I and Narrative II.