Going back to basics on grammar

Plus two more poems to learn and thoughts on maths books

This from

Daisy Christodoulou

is music to my ears:

The biggest change I would like to see in England at primary is a reduction in the grammar content. Currently, students are answering questions about modal verbs and fronted adverbials when they struggle to identify what a verb is. This is a classic example of running before you can walk - or, in a metaphor I’ve used many times before, training for a marathon by running a marathon.

(From Designing the perfect assessment system, Part 4: slimming down the curriculum)

One of the delights of home education is that I don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. But in truth, I often find it a good place to start. For my family it’s not enough on its own, but it’s not a bad baseline.

But one area where I really struggle with the National Curriculum is grammar.

Here’s what the government expects primary age children to learn:

Year 1 (Kindergarten in the US, age 5-6)

letter, capital letter, word, singular, plural, sentence, punctuation, full stop, question mark, exclamation mark

Year 2 (1st Grade)

noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix, adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma

Year 3

preposition, conjunction, word family, prefix, clause, subordinate clause, direct speech, consonant, consonant letter, vowel, vowel letter, inverted commas (or ‘speech marks’)

Year 4

determiner, pronoun, possessive pronoun, adverbial

Year 5

modal verb, relative pronoun, relative clause, parenthesis, bracket, dash, cohesion, ambiguity

Year 6

subject, object, active, passive, synonym, antonym, ellipsis, hyphen, colon, semi-colon, bullet points

I don’t shy away from teaching the children hard things. We’ve been learning Ancient Greek for several years now. And I try to make sure that their learning of the essentials is roughly in line with that of their peers in school, so that if they ever need to go to school, for whatever reason, they’re not ‘behind’ and floundering.

But the National Curriculum grammar requirements have me stumped. Some of it, of course, is pretty obvious and self-explanatory, especially to children who read a lot. But some of it gets complicated, fast. And although I could teach my children to parrot some definitions, and although I think learning by rote can be a very useful thing to do, I can see that with grammar this is not going to work. A lot of this stuff is like trying to teach percentages to a child who hasn’t yet grasped their basic maths facts. As Daisy says, you’d be much better off spending more time on the basics than rushing on to the next thing.

So I ditched the National Curriculum and decided to go it alone, which is why I was particularly pleased to read Daisy’s views on grammar, because it’s always nice to know that you’re not alone!

In our family (my children are 7 and 9), we have been slowly working through the parts of speech, and in the simplest way possible. Each week (mostly) I give each child an extract from a good book and they work through it highlighting verbs, nouns etc in different colours. I don’t ask them to find every single example. I ask them to give me short sentences using the new term I’ve introduced. We revise constantly, because this stuff is taking a long time to sink in.

I have several different grammar books in the house at the moment but for our purposes the most straightforward is Usborne Junior Illustrated Grammar and Punctuation. It goes into a lot of detail, but you can also just use the most basic definitions and examples and leave it at that (for now). It also has exercises for you to test your knowledge. We dip into the Jolly Grammar workbooks too, not very systematically but they are useful for finding simple exercises to, for example, choose adverbs to liven up a short story. (While writing this I discovered there’s an even more junior Usborne book: First Illustrated Grammar and Punctuation, which I will be adding to my library list.)

My expectation is that we will get there with the curriculum, just not on schedule, and in this instance that’s fine. I would much rather my children had a really firm grasp on the basics than have them bemused by subordinate clauses. As Daisy so wisely says, there’s no sense in trying to run before you can walk.

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Other things that are working right now

I am very wary of CGP books. CGP books got me an A in my maths GCSE, which was truly miraculous. But they did it without giving me the slightest understanding of why I was doing the various steps I was doing. I didn’t understand the concepts at all, and that’s not the education I want for my children.

However, someone was giving away a stack of CGP ‘10 minute weekly workouts’ recently so I had a look. And although I still wouldn’t give them to my children to work through, I have been using them to give the children short warm ups at the blackboard. For maths, I like that I can pick and choose different areas to keep them sharp on a variety of topics, not just the one they’re focusing on. We love the Master Maths at Home series of maths books, but because they’re topic-based a child gets really good at, say, multiplication, but doesn’t do any geometry for a little while. The quick questions and problems in the CGP weekly workouts books are a nice way to keep everything ticking over.

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Two more poems to learn

My post on eight poems worth learning is the most popular thing I’ve ever written, by a long way. So here are two more.

For readers also in the northern hemisphere, we enjoyed learning William Blake’s Spring Song, which the children have been repeating to themselves as they potter about outside in the spring sunshine:

Spring is coming, spring is coming,
Birdies build your nest;
Weave together straw and feather,
Doing each your best. 

Spring is coming, spring is coming,
Flowers are coming too;
Pansies, lilies, daffodillies
Now are coming through.

Spring is coming, spring is coming,
All around is fair;
Shimmer and quiver on the river,
Joy is everywhere.

Loré Pemberton’s gorgeous painting, ‘Seedlings’

And my daughter is thoroughly enjoying learning TS Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat. She recently devoured the two Varjak Paw books by SF Said, so was in just the right mood for a good cat poem. Still in copyright so I won’t reproduce the whole thing. Read it here.

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw—
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

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