GRAMMAR & PUNCTUATION GR1

Our state requires home schooled children be taught grammar as its own subject but my son HATED the first curriculum we started with (it was too fast-paced with several rules jumbled together and rushed into one lesson) so he was leery of any language arts whatsoever. I went to a local school store and thumbed through several first grade grammar workbooks, looking for something that was fun and engaging while teaching grammatical rules ONE AT A TIME and building a slow, steady but sure foundation. This one fit the bill! It begins with the rule "A period is at the end of a sentence." Then you have a couple of practice pages - never with more than 8 questions - where you put a period at the end of a sentence. My son was suspicious that grammar could be that doable. No moaning, no groaning, no whining and no pencil throwing. In less than ten minutes we were done with the page for that day. (We do one page per day, 5 days per week. Each rule is presented on its own page in clear terms and then has 3-4 pages of practice.) The next rule was "Sentences begin with a capital letter". The work involved circling the capital letters and then fixing any sentences that began with lowercase letters by writing a capital letter over the lowercase one. ONE LETTER in a couple of places is all he had to write? Hm, that's not so bad. No tears that day! The rest of the rules proceeded just as gently - simply defining them in a way a six year-old could understand and letting him do just the right amount of practice to where he understood the concept but not so much repetition that he hated it. Sometimes the last practice page has some sort of coloring activity (ie: color the "action" or "doing" words because those are verbs) or it is a "fill in your own answer" page, which he LOVES to complete with his own funny words and names, properly capitalized of course! We are halfway through the book 4 months into school and I'm absolutely ordering Grade 2 when he's finished with Grade 1. This workbook has been 100% no fuss, no frustration and he's learning grammatical rules incredibly well and retaining them, which is the most important aspect. If you want a totally stress-free way to introduce grammar (especially to boys), this is the curriculum for you! For those who worry that this work may be too easy or that your child will be out-paced by public school friends, I assure you that the book makes grammar so friendly that your child wouldn't object to moving more quickly through it. If you take the few minutes to teach them well, your child will have a solid foundation on which they can rely because they have learned good grammar in proper order. With that said, my son's public school peers are learning capital letters are at the beginning of sentences and other random words that the teacher tells them to capitalize (like days, months and holidays), which causes confusion because the rules have been jumbled into one lesson and the children don't understand when they should capitalize certain words because it hasn't been broken down into understandable bits for them. Capitalizing names, days, months and holidays were rules number 3,4,5 and 6 in this workbook and my son would not have any difficulty explaining his friend's homework to them before returning to his own work on Rule 13: Pronouns. I very much wish we would have started with this curriculum but I am so glad we have found it now!

This grammar workbook has been a simple but effective tool for our homeschool. On it's own it's probably not enough but as a foundation or supplement it really works. I like how it very simply explains the rules and gives examples. The book is basically 25 grammar rules and 3 pages of reinforcement practice for each. I do wish there had been a little more in practice but overall I'm still very happy with this series. I pair it with First Language Lessons from Well Trained Mind to round out grammar for my kids. I will continue using these together. If you're looking for a no frills, to the point grammar reinforcement workbook for the elementary years, this is for you.

The book is good in the sense that it explains clearly about verbs/contractions etc but the kids can kind of cheat stuff because if the book talks about verbs , it just talks about verbs for couple of pages. It would have been nice if there were some exercises where they can mix stuff as they build from previous lessons. But I still like the rule based approach and recommend it as starting point.

It is very easy to study. So my son can study by himself everyday. After finishing this book, he will study grade 2.

My kid loves this one for some reason. Love the way it's laid out, good rules for a 1dt grader to learn :)