All that being said, there was a REASON why I didn't take said college courses on teaching grammar. I really don't like it. Don't get me wrong, I understand the necessity of understanding the various parts of speech and how, in the long run, they help us to construct meaningful and interesting sentences. That doesn't mean I like to teach it. In fact, I loathe teaching grammar. It's not as easy as one might thing to show another person what a preposition is, or how a verb is actually important to make a complete sentence, much less why we need to know these things. This was very true with a bunch of second-language learning middle schoolers and it's even more true while trying to teach a 7 year-old. Luckily, (more for me than for him), he was actually able to tie a lot of our learning on prepositions today to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While he was drawing his pictures in his workbook today, there was a bunch of "Michelangelo goes into the sewer!" and "Donatello goes through the tunnel!" This certainly made it easier for me...somewhat. I still find it difficult to describe "at" or "during." What's even worse, this was only the beginning of our new 3rd grade grammar curriculum. Ee gads!
When I was teaching Literacy in public school, there was always a point when I would have to ultimately break down and do something that, if truth be told, I didn't really have the training to do: teach grammar. Now, I don't have an English degree - I just happened to take enough English classes to be considered Highly Qualified in my profession (about 36 credit hours or so). Since I don't have an English degree, I didn't take any pedagogical classes on how to teach prepositions, prepositional phrases, or complex and compound sentences. I mostly winged it when it became obvious that my students had no idea what a preposition was or how it differed from a verb. Granted, being a highly intelligent person with a vast background knowledge (and a few helpful sites on the internet), I was able to soundly instruct my kids on verbs, adverbs, and the like with relative success and now I feel rather comfortable when diagramming a sentence for telling The Monk what a noun is.
All that being said, there was a REASON why I didn't take said college courses on teaching grammar. I really don't like it. Don't get me wrong, I understand the necessity of understanding the various parts of speech and how, in the long run, they help us to construct meaningful and interesting sentences. That doesn't mean I like to teach it. In fact, I loathe teaching grammar. It's not as easy as one might thing to show another person what a preposition is, or how a verb is actually important to make a complete sentence, much less why we need to know these things. This was very true with a bunch of second-language learning middle schoolers and it's even more true while trying to teach a 7 year-old. Luckily, (more for me than for him), he was actually able to tie a lot of our learning on prepositions today to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While he was drawing his pictures in his workbook today, there was a bunch of "Michelangelo goes into the sewer!" and "Donatello goes through the tunnel!" This certainly made it easier for me...somewhat. I still find it difficult to describe "at" or "during." What's even worse, this was only the beginning of our new 3rd grade grammar curriculum. Ee gads!
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How it all started...I was a public school teacher for 6 years in a very urban middle school for both 7th and 8th grade. As the red-tape got thicker and teaching became more of a business rather than a place to prepare young minds to enter into the world, I decided that if I was going to work that hard to give an education to someone, it should be my own son. So, my adventures in homeschooling has begun. Follow us on Instagram!
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