I just posted a week or so ago about my son’s reading problem Now I would like some ideas on English.He is in 5th grade now ,doing 3rd grade reading and English.However ,it is one big fight to get him to do English.He says it is too hard.Scool is almost over and he has only done half the book.His writing is terrible,so he won’t hardly write anything.Its there any curriculm out there for kids with his type of problems-something in a workbook style that he can learn the basics and maybe have smaller bites of work to do.I am using School of Tomorrow curriculm.He has done better in it than anything else I have tried-but again it is a fight and he has only done half the years work.Trying to talk to him about capitalization,common and proper noune is hard enough to get him to understand,but when you try explaining nouns ,pronouns,verbs,ect. you might as well speak in a foriegn language he has never heard.Any ideas would be appreciated.Thanks.
Re: Best grammar approach I have found......
Easy Grammar is the best I’ve found for basic grammar skills. It’s not overwhelming for a child like this, and the presentation makes a lot of sense. You can aim for one workbook page a day (our 3/4th grade book has about 215 pages) to get through a year’s worth of grammar and punctuation. It is very incremental and explicit. It is in a workbook format, but with the rules right in the workbook. A page might have 5 rules of capitalization on it, each with an example, and then 5 capitalization problems on the bottom to work. After several pages like this, there will be a page of review problems that require implementation of all of the rules just learned. It’s really good! Website is http://www.easygrammar.com
Incidentally, I do not recommend their Daily Grams, unless you first find that Easy Grammar is not enough.
Mary
I wrestled with that problem, and not only do the kids crawl through regular English instruction like it was hip-deep mud, they don’t apply it to writing and generally don’t seem to get much out of it, and while I don’t mind saying “I know you don’t like this, but do it because it’s the best way I know for you to learn this stuff,” I *do* mind making kids do stuff that is hard that they hate — that *doesn’t* really help them learn.
New Community School out of Richmond Virginia put their own book together called “When THey Can’t Write” that I really like — it’s very step by step with tons of practice. Starts with really simple sentences (John runs.) and builds from there. It’s also not a lot of work for the teacher. It’s a little expensive for a parent (if I remember right, teachers can copy the workbook for their students) but worth it in my opinion. http://freenet.vcu.edu/education/newcomm/ is their website and you can call to get a brochure about the books sent to you (or to order it).
Another good resource is Diana Hanbury King’s _Writing Skills for Adolescents._ It’s not as step-by-step but it’s a whole lot cheaper and it has more ideas in it that can get you started. You can get it from Educators PUblishing Service (http://www.epsbooks.com) — there are lots of other good resources there, too.
There are tons of materials out there, but most of them just don’t fit well with certain kinds of kids.
TNCS