Do any of these statements fit your family?

• You hate grammar
• Your kids hate grammar
• You don’t understand grammar
• You don’t have time to sit down and teach grammar every day
• After months of grammar practice your kids forget everything they’ve learned
• You know you need to teach grammar but don’t know where to start
• You’ve tried lots of grammar programs but don’t like any of them

If you said yes to any one of these, you’re in the right place! Believe me, I have been where you are! After 15 years of trial and error, I have found a super simple method for teaching grammar that works! And believe me when I say trial and ERROR!

When my kids were little, being new to homeschooling, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing (imagine that!) I have 6 kids all close in age, so it wasn’t long before I had about 4 of them homeschooling at the same time. I didn’t really have a great concept of the importance of grammar and writing when they were young. There were so many people saying, “Oh, they will learn it quicker when they’re older.” Combine that with the fact that my oldest were boys who HATED writing and practically collapsed in a coma at the mere mention–it was a recipe for disaster! Needless to say, when my husband insisted we have them tested when they were in about 5th grade and below, you can imagine my horror when they all FAILED their standardized testing because of their horrible language arts scores!!

Talk about feeling like a failure! I wanted to sink into a hole and never come out! I cried and cried. How could I have been so stupid?! Surely I should put them in public school so they could actually LEARN something?!

Well, after beating myself up, I finally got back up, dusted myself off, and set to work figuring out how to teach them grammar and writing. Since then I’ve used so many grammar programs I can’t remember them all. ALL of them would start with a long section on Sentence Types, then move on to a long section on Nouns, then a long section on Verbs, followed by a long section on Adverbs, at which point no one, including me, remembered anything they had learned 2 sections before, or how to integrate any of these parts of speech together, much less in writing. On top of that, they ALWAYS put the Capitalization and Punctuation sections LAST. This means you don’t study them until the END of the year, at which point it would have been REALLY nice to have had that VERY IMPORTANT information at the BEGINNING of the year before you started doing all your writing!!

Eventually I ran into Shurley English. This was the first program we tried that integrated everything you learned as you went along. It was easy to see the kids retained what they were learning, and I would have stuck with it, but I just HATED the way the homeschool books were laid out. The teachers book is so long and unnecessarily wordy, it’s hard to reference anything quickly, and the workbooks are laid out in a weird order. I’ve actually called and emailed Shurley SEVERAL times, asking them to update the homeschool books. They’ve updated the public school ones, even to the point of making a digital interactive version, but they have no plans that I can see to update the homeschool version. I finally got fed up and that’s when I found…

Easy Grammar Daily Grams! I thought I had struck gold! Here it was!

• super simple
• perfectly laid out
• easy-to-teach
• instructions for each grammar concept right on the page
• quick one-page-a-day format
• EVERY day covers all the main grammar parts and integrates them

Every day it covered capitalization, punctuation, parts of speech, grammar concepts, and sentence combining. Now the kiddo would be retaining and practicing all of these concepts EVERYDAY, all integrated into one. Brilliant! There was just one thing missing….If the child didn’t have a good handle on parts of speech or other grammar concepts before using the daily grams, it might not be enough explanation and repetition of that single concept to really solidify it in the student’s mind.

Then I realized Easy Grammar had a regular, more traditional grammar workbook that went with the daily grams. Perfect! Now they could do both books each day: 1-3 pages in Easy Grammar and 1 page in the daily grams, reinforcing all the concepts and starting right away teaching them capitalization, punctuation, and sentence combining.

So here is my perfect formula:

Kids 2nd-5th grade:

• Use Shurley English Songs and the practice book for that year (This is a skinning little book Shurley sells that goes with each level. It’s all you need from them…you don’t need the regular book). The songs really help kids remember the parts of speech and the practice book is super easy to use and reinforces the songs.
• Use Easy Grammar Daily Grams for their grade level, or start at a lower grade if they need remedial help
• Use Easy Grammar Book (2nd grade doesn’t have this. They only need Daily Grams at that point.)

Kids 6th grade-high school:

• Use Easy Grammar Daily Grams for their grade level, or start at a lower grade if they need remedial help
• Use Easy Grammar Book

What if I have lots of ages of children? Do I put them all in their specific grade level?

This is totally flexible! One thing I learned is that grammar repeats almost the exact same things over and over every year. This means a 3rd grader and a 7th grader are doing almost the same exact kind of work. So feel free to put them all in the same book at the same level if it simplifies your life! I’ve done it many times. One year I had 4th, 6th, and 8th graders all working in a 5th grade level book. I looked at the books for their respective grades, and they are almost the same as each other, so I just picked a book in the middle-ish and it worked out fine.

Easy Grammar does not take a lot of teacher time. There is no teacher instruction book because you don’t need it. (There is an answer key) All of the instruction for each concept is in the student’s book. You can use your discretion as to whether you need to sit with your student and go over each day’s lesson. I would do one of the following:

• Read the lesson with your child and make sure they are doing it correctly
• Have the child do it on their own and grade it or look it over after or later to make sure they understood the concept

If they are pretty quick they might not need your help. But I ALWAYS recommend going over their work if you’re not sitting with them, no matter what age they are, to make sure they’re on track.

Easy Grammar is a gem! I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have! Don’t let Grammar get you down! This is an “Easy” fix!