Teaching grammar and writing in the UK, using US resources

[Florence]

I'm UK-based, and am looking into grammar and writing curricula for next year and onwards for my eldest who is nearly 7 (so UK year 2/US 1st grade equivalent). I've done a ton of reading around many different options, the majority of which are US resources, as there is so much more home ed content on offer there, and much of it is of a higher quality than what's available over here - which obviously has a strong appeal. However, I keep coming up against a couple of obstacles, as follows:

• Many US curricula are very keen on sentence diagramming. This approach is not taught in UK schools, and so I never learnt it. Almost all of what I learnt on English grammar I learnt through studying Latin and modern languages - and now I would say I have a pretty solid understanding, but I would like my children to learn grammar in and through English first. However, I'm not convinced that learning the diagramming process is strictly necessary, and so I can't make up my mind whether curricula that take this approach would be a good fit for us or not.
• It appears that another widespread approach to English grammar in US resources involves identifying and making reference to predicates. This is not something I have ever encountered in any language study previously (again, it's not taught in the UK, for English or other languages), and if I'm honest I just don't see the point: my preference would be to teach kids to pick out and identify all the parts of speech individually rather than lumping everything but the subject together as 'the predicate'.

So I guess I'm looking for advice on whether it would be feasible to take on a curriculum that features these elements (I've been considering FLL particularly, probably alongside WWE, and potentially moving on to WWS in the future, but this applies to a huge range of possible options) and just a) skip the diagramming parts and b) ignore references to predicates and just teach individual parts of speech specifically? Or would I render a curriculum needlessly tricky to use AND be missing a huge part of the point in doing that??

I would add that, I'm prepared to be convinced of the value in diagramming sentences! I guess I'm aware that it will add another level of complexity to our plans, as I'll have to learn the process myself, before I can teach it to my kids... But that's doable. I suppose I'm just curious as to whether either of these things should be a deal breaker when choosing a grammar or writing curriculum for our situation as they're completely unknown to me.

[Rosie_0801]

It really depends what you want out of grammar study.

Diagramming was hugely important here because dd has learning disabilities related to syntax. The diagramming taught her how pieces of sentence related to each other. (One does teach the parts of speech before diagramming, and before predicates and such.) It also gave us vocabulary we could use to discuss errors. I don't know about you, but here in Australia it's pretty common for English teachers to correct your essays without ever telling you what the error is called, so you don't ever understand what you did either correctly or incorrectly, let alone when to do or not do whatever it was again.

Other people think it's a waste of time and don't bother with it. Like I said, it's up to you. It isn't a case of if you don't start at age 7 you can never start at all, so you can postpone the decision until later.

[caffeineandbooks]

Another reply from Australia.  Like you, I'd never heard of diagramming before homeschooling, despite learning two foreign languages as well. I consider diagramming to be a weird American quirk 😛  We used Easy Grammar, which doesn't do any diagramming, and I have filled in some ad hoc grammar for them (the concept of cases, for example) as we've studied Latin.  I do have Grammar for the Well Trained Mind on my shelf, but we haven't used it so far.  I haven't used FLL, but the website says diagramming isn't introduced until level 3.  You could always try it for a year or two and delay the decision about diagramming until you're approaching level 3.

We do use WWE and WWS.  They include some gentle grammar - how to use commas, what an adjective is, how to turn an adjective into a noun phrase, that kind of thing - but no diagramming knowledge is provided or assumed.  I did however have to decide what to do when Australian usage differs from American.  Would I use our date formats or theirs?  Periods after abbreviations like Mr or not?  Correct American spellings, which are in most of our curriculum, or let them slide? 

Both WWE and WWS have been great for us.  Like Susan says in many places, when your neighbour's third grader is bringing home a research report and your third grader is summarising a page of reading into 3 sentences, the classical approach doesn't look very impressive.  But by sticking with the program I've reached the stage where my 13 year old just researched and wrote a 1500 word essay with good style and structure, proper footnotes and a bibliography, way ahead of what a schooled kid the same age would produce here, and I'm so pleased we took the time to lay a strong foundation.

[Clarita]

2 hours ago, caffeineandbooks said:

Like Susan says in many places, when your neighbour's third grader is bringing home a research report and your third grader is summarising a page of reading into 3 sentences, the classical approach doesn't look very impressive.  But by sticking with the program I've reached the stage where my 13 year old just researched and wrote a 1500 word essay with good style and structure, proper footnotes and a bibliography, way ahead of what a schooled kid the same age would produce here, and I'm so pleased we took the time to lay a strong foundation.

I needed this today.