GRAMMAR WORKS

A Summary on Grammar Works

Its primary objective is to equip students with the basic grammar skills they will need to use to be successful in more advanced English and Composition courses. The author's ideal students would have these mastered by 9th grade, but if not then, the sooner they master them the better.

• Students will create a Grammar and Composition Notebook documenting the principles they are learning and serving as a Grammar Handbook for use in their upper level classes.
• Students will learn sentence patterns, conjugation of verbs, irregular verbs in particular, the different parts of speech and their functions, the rules of capitalization and punctuation, subjective, objective and possessive case pronouns, declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences, and plural nouns to name a few.
• The text includes paragraph writing, letter writing, book report writing, basic library skills, outlining and creating a summary.
• During the course of instruction, students will learn a process called syntactical analysis. Even as orthographic analysis breaks down sounds and discovers applicable spelling rules with single words, syntactical analysis determines how sentences create meaning.
• Students look for the component parts of sentence patterns and label them.
• They look for parts of speech like adjectives or adverbs and then identify the words they modify and label them. They find prepositional phrases and label them.
• Because understanding syntax is as much a reading skill as understanding phonemes is in decoding print, showing students the jobs that words do immerses them in the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of English. When students understand why words do what they do and how they actually create meaning in concert with other grammatical structures, their literacy flourishes.
• Teachers have four strategically placed Checklists located in the text. These checklists contain the principles introduced in the lessons students are navigating. These Checklists become a point of review for students and teachers. If a student can explain a concept, he understands the purpose for it.
• The endgame with Grammar Works is this:
  • A student’s success with language acquisition is a demonstrated automaticity.
  • To be automatic is to be so well practiced and so well coached that literacy becomes virtually instinctive.
  • Performance becomes spontaneous, involuntary, and unpremeditated.
  • Students perform well because they have been taught well.
  • Students learn to conform our written and spoken language to a practiced standard.
  • Grammar Works is designed to create this endgame and do it proficiently.