I have always struggled with the straight-forward concept of teaching children grammar using worksheets. I guess it just baffles me to treat a child like they know nothing of the english language since we've been teaching them to speak and voice their opinions since they were old enough to toddle! I guess this is why I've been kicking around the idea of teaching my kids the concept of how to put their thoughts down on paper and doing it successfully BEFORE they really need to fully understand the label of a preposition is and it's function or a conjunction.

We've always used a very wide vocabulary with our kids and they know if they don't understand what a word means that we look it up together and compare it's definition with synonyms that the kids are familiar with. In doing this since they were very young, our children have developed a rather impressive vocabulary...something that has not gone unnoticed by my MIL, a public school teacher.

I was appalled to find that my 3rd grade daughter, upon removal from PS (public school), had no idea how to formulate a paragraph. Punctuation wasn't present and the basic rules of spacing words and capitalization was completely absent. The same symptoms of neglect were apparent in my 1st grade son also, and worse yet, he felt so overwhelmed with the idea of writing that he flat refused to do it at first. Since then, I have completely rethought the idea of "grammar" and all it entails for success and have decided that using quiet reading, reading aloud, penmanship and creative writing we are going to give our kids the building blocks to succeed in writing.

My two youngest have begun to bloom under this new format. They are writing freely and really thinking about how writing works. Punctuation is not a maze of dots and dashes, but code symbols to tell your reader HOW to understand what you are reading!

I'll post more as our new "curriculum" begins to flesh out.