How do you use Shurley with multiple grades?

[Julesnpebbles@suddenlink.]

I can hardly get to instruct my 4th grader and I haven't been able to start my 2nd grader at all and I've had it for about 3 weeks!

 

is there any way to organize Shurley lessons so that they can do most of the work themselves? I'd like to plan at the beginning of the week so that most of the new lessons are more independently learned by my 4th grader so that I can spend the time with my 2nd grader. She needs a lot more of my attention! My 4th grader is quite independent but his eyes cross when he looks at the Teacher's Guide. I thought about highlighting the parts I'd like him to read but I feel like it would be too much. I love Shurley - we're on Chapter 4 - but we're moving slowly because after schooling 3 kids with a demanding toddler - I can't get to doing the grammar lesson consistently.

 

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[HSMom2One]

I give dd the vocabulary to do on her own one day per week. She is also able to do the jingles without me, and she can also do sentence classification on her own...but the rest of the curriculum is pretty teacher intensive. I don't know what to suggest other than just going at a slower pace.

 

We have been doing Level 3 at a lower frequency per week over both 3rd and 4th grade - which I think is fine since I've been told by others on this board that both levels are nearly the same. We only do grammar 3 times per week, and then do dictation and free writing time on the other two days. She is doing fine with this. Next year we will concentrate on composition more than grammar.

 

I hope that helps.

 

Blessings,

Lucinda

[PeterPan]

Jules, don't hand your ds the tm. That's just plain mean, lol. If you need independent, get GWG or something meant for him to read. You want him to come out liking grammar, not hating it! And as for how to implement it, well I suggest that if *you* learn the method, as in teach your oldest consistently, you're going to have no problem teaching the other dc easily and efficiently. Are you sure you need to do all that other stuff? We do just the sentence parsing, nothing else, and we use the extra student practice books where the sentences are already typed out and ready to go. Takes under 10 minutes. At this point, having been doing it several years, my dd now pretty much does it independently. I go over it with her because I want to make sure she actually UNDERSTANDS what she's labeled (not just putting acroynms and forgetting what they mean!). I also have her diagram one sentence of the 2-3 each day. It doesn't take long, and we do it on the whiteboard together. The Q&A flows for Shurley make diagraming so natural, because the dc is already used to thinking in terms of what modifies what. Or at least it has been a snap for my dd.

 

So anyways, work with your son, learn how the Q&A flows work, and I'll bet you find it a breeze to then teach your 2nd grader. At this point I've done the Q&A flows so much, I could probably do the lower levels without a tm. ;)

[dymphna57]

I really like Shurley Grammar as it does give primary school children the tools to learn grammar rules and well structured paragraphs. I wish I had had it for my first two but my third ds, in college now is still using his SG skills.

I honestly never used it in grade two because we used FLL for the first two grades. I do know that the first year you use SG it seems like a lot of work. The truth is that is has a lot of review and is structured by the day of the week so it is easy to schedule. I spend less than an hour a week teaching as I only bother introducing new stuff and they do the practices, vocabulary, sentences, and tests on their own. We are using IEW to supplement writing for one of the dc this year so we are all using it but we now use some of the topics from Shurley Grammar, bizare twist of fate.

If you don't get it all the first year, you will pick it up the second year. We concentrated more on the jingles and vocabulary the first year although we did diagram sentences and do some of the writing assignments. I changed the topic for those to correspond with history or religion though.

This year I have an 8th, 5th and 3rd grader in Shurley. My fifth grader commented on how she and her little sister are both doing the same concepts in the same week but at different levels.

Short answer, it gets better and it is easy to teach different levels . I