Elem. Grammar: Retention/understanding issues

[Sue G in PA]

My ds9 does well with GWG4. He enjoys it even. I've been noticing, however, that his retention and actual understanding is rather low. While diagramming sentences w/ adjectives the past 2 days, he is still having trouble figuring out which is the verb, which are adjectives, which are nouns, etc. It's not horrible...most of the time he is correct. I'm not overly concerned, just curous if anybody else has this problem with their dc and grammar terms? It makes me re-think my desire to actually teach diagramming at this age AND use a grammar program that actually names parts or speech, etc. (Thus, switch to PLL/ILL!). If he is spending all this time on grammar and really not retaining or understanding everything...why waste the time? Maybe he'd do better holding off a few years as some do? Not sure. Like I said...just curious if anybody else has this issue. OH, btw, my dd11 had the same problems until just a few months ago and she's using R&S5. It's just now starting to "click" with her.

[training5]

Well, my guys will be doing the chap 6 Review of GWG4 tomorrow and I have noticed the same thing. We skip all the diagramming excercises (dodging tomatoes, now) because they were too confusing past the very basic ones for my guys. Maybe later they will make sense. I have noticed for my mastery guys they need more than just a little drill to have a concept sink in. That is why we are using CLE Lang. Arts 4 this next time round instead of moving on. I do have to admit, they did both pass the CLE 100-400 LA placement tests. But I cheated...I had them correct all of their errors before I graded it. Guess that doesn't count as pass, then does it?

You might try playing games with him to reinforce the parts of speech. Have him make up 5 or 6 nouns, verbs, adj., adv. and make up silly sentences with them. You could color code the cards and/or have him copy some of the sentences and color the different parts of speech different colors. Oak Meadow suggests doing this. It is a bit like the Winston Grammar approach, as well.

HTH.

[WABeth]

My dd9 also just finished the section 6 review of GWG 4. Her biggest problem with diagramming is not recognizing helping verbs and trying to make them adverbs. She also doesn't always put adjectives and adverbs under the correct word that they are describing. I took a week off (since prepositions are next and I know that will add another twist to diagramming). For this week I typed up many of the past sentences from diagramming exercises and gave her a sheet of sentences each day. I had her first label each word (as she is used to doing in Latin - LfC) and then diagram. In one day she had recognized most of her errors and has gotten almost every sentence correct the rest of the week. It helped just to focus only on diagramming without several other exercises to do on those days. It also really helped her to label every word first and be sure she understood its role in the sentence before putting it on the diagram.

HTH