Shurley Grammar:

Um, I'm not really sure what the poster in question wanted to know. Basically, there are several components to it.

First up are the jingles. Do not be confused, these are *not* songs. They are more like poemy chants. The CD that comes with shows you how they are supposed to be said. Each one is specific to a part of speech. I only have Level 1 and Level 2, I would say Level 1 is more like typical second grade grammar, rather than first.

OK, so there are the following Jingles in levels 1 and 2: Sentence, Noun, verb, adverb, adjective, article adjective, preposition, object of the preposition, pronoun, subject pronoun, and possessive pronoun.

They sound really dorky at first, but they are kinda catchy if you review them enough. I can't say how many times, I've gone around with "a sentence, sentence, sentence, is complete, complete, complete, when five simple rules it meets, meets, meets. It has a subject, subject, and a verb, verb, verb. . . ." running through my head.

Level one only has I think up through the object of the prep jingle.

I think for this review, I'll only do Level 1, since that would be the most logical place to start, and since I haven't done nearly as much of Level 2 as I have of level 1.

Ok, the first several weeks, you're going to wonder why I think it's more of a second grade grammar program. It has you cutting out different things from magazines and putting them into categories. For example, one day might be: trees, flowers, grass/weeds. Or furniture: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room. Yeah. If you are anything like me, you collect a stack of magazine discards from work, and ask friends for old magazines and check out the stack of old issues free outside your library, and then hand your children the stack and two pairs of scissors and tell them to go to town while you do a read-aloud. My children don't just sort precut pictures, they cut them out according to category and then sort. It's like the first 4 weeks, every day. So, we did about 2 weeks worth, and I just had them list stuff for each group for the second two weeks.

Week 5 starts the actual lessons. It introduces the first jingles, and has a couple little stories about how words become a sentence, and how they have to follow the rules. The same topic is continued all 5 days of each week.

Then, starting in Lesson 6, you introduce vocab (which is supposed to make sure your child understands the words, so they know which category it falls into, but so far, we haven't run across a word they didn't know yet. The words are the ones used in the sentences later in the same lesson that haven't been used in previous lessons. For example, the vocab for Chapter 6, Lesson 2 is: cats, boys, bears, sat, run. Yep. No kidding. So vocab takes like no time at all if you actually do it. Then, in chapter 6, you start getting I think 3 sentences every day to diagram. Chapter 6's sentences are very short, since the only jingles you have done up to this point are sentence, noun, and verb.

All the lessons are completely scripted, so if you don't know what to say, read the words on the page. Each sentence is scripted until you've done it enough times that you should know the script by memory.

So, to go along with the above vocab for Chapter 6, lesson 2, the sentences are:

1. Cats sat.
2. Boys sat.
3. Bears run.

So, you mark the nouns and verbs.

As you progress, the sentences get longer, and they add stuff like synonyms and antonyms and journaling and other odds and ends like capitalization and so forth.

There is also a workbook for each level. It's not entirely necessary in my opinion, since most of that is in the teacher's manual. However, it has all the jingles in the front.

The workbook is arranged by sections, so there is some flipping around of pages. It has some reference pages for rules such as how to tell the difference between a preposition and an adverb, or contractions, things like that. There is also a practice section, a test section, and an activity section. We havent' written in ours yet. I'm saving it for the next crew. It's not a whole lot that you couldn't just write almost everything out. Or open it up and look without writing.

So, to show you a sample, I think I'm going to head on over to week, um, 9. That's not too much info yet, but enough that you can see how it works.

OK, Chapter 9, lesson 4, chosen at random.

Jingle Time--practice jingles (takes about 2-3 minutes)

Vocabulary time--words for today: large, ships, sailed, rapidly--takes 1-2 minutes

Grammar Time--

1. Four large ducks waddled slowly.
2. A large horse jumped quickly.
3. Several large ships sailed rapidly away.

These, you'd write on the board or paper of some sort, and work through them together.

So, how do you teach?

You walk through the sentences following these question and answer flows. You try to say the same thing every time, so it becomes memorized and automatic.

1. Four large ducks waddled slowly.

What waddled slowly? Ducks--subject noun.
What is being said about ducks?--ducks waddled, verb.
Waddled how?--slowly--adverb (I'll come back to these last 3 here in a minute).
What kind of ducks?--large--adjective
How many ducks?--four--adjective.

Ok, in reality, this is what we do. Subject noun and verb, we follow the above.

Adjectives, we go over to the adverbs, we'd open the workbook and go through the jingles one by one starting with adverb (since it's listed first)

"An adverb modifies a verb. An adverb asks, How? When? Where? To find an adverb, Go, Ask, Get. Where do we go? To a verb. What do I ask? How? When? Where? What do I get, an adverb, that's what."

So, *we* walk through the jingle step by step. The book does this sometime scripted, but mostly not.

An adverb modifies a what? Yep, a verb. What's the verb in this sentence? You just marked it. Yep, waddled. Ok, let's go on with the jingle. An adverb asks, How? When? Where? To find an adverb, go, ask get. Where do I go? To the verb. Got your verb? OK, what do I ask? How? How did the ducks waddle? Slowly. Right. OK, next question. When? When did the ducks waddle? We don't know. OK, Where did the ducks waddle? We don't know that either. So we are done with adverbs. What's the next jingle. Right: adjectives.

Then, we walk through that jingle and the next one until every word in the sentence is labeled.

The last thing for that day is free journaling.

There are occasional tests, but mostly it is all oral, so you can have several children learning at the same time if you wanted to and none of them were too good at grammar or needed review.

But a lot of it is scripted, so you can just sort of walk your way through it without having to think to hard about teaching it, and then just adapting the script where necessary. I know some people dont' like scripted, but grammar is one area which I can do pretty well, but I have no idea how to go about teaching, so scripted is OK by me.