When I first started teaching at the homeschool tutorial where I now use my grammar book for each of my English classes, I used the kind of grammar book where you underline or circle parts of grammar on each workbook page. My students were bored to tears, learned very little, and grading all those pages of grammar took up precious moments of our one class per week.
Four summers ago, I decided to do something about the fact that there did not seem to be an efficient and effective way to learn grammar: I wrote my own grammar book that used formulas to teach where different punctuation should be placed.
This idea came from two formulas that I used when I taught my ACT prep class for juniors and seniors at the homeschool tutorial. This came from an English ACT prep workbook and was included on the "quick shortcuts" page that the author had compiled. She said to remember that commas are only needed in one kind of complex sentence. DC, IC. but IC DC. This got me thinking, "What if I could use this method for ALL of the sentence patterns that sometimes gave my students trouble?"
In A New Grammary this formula method is expanded to handle all kinds of clauses and phrases as well as sentences with quotations. The book begins with a page per part of speech in order to establish the vocabulary needed to handle the formulas. It is appropriate to use those pages for ANY AGE grammar student. After the vocabulary is established, the formulas are introduced by talking about independent clauses and fragments.
This book would be a helpful resource for any grammar learner but would be especially helpful for middle school grammar students who have had some grammar in the past. It is also extremely helpful for English as a second language learners who need help with their writing. Adult writers can benefit from the book by using it as a resource when wondering where to put and leave out those tricky commas.
When I teach through this book with my middle schoolers, I use one page per class. Since we only meet once a week, this works well for us. I read through the page, and we come up with silly examples in class. If the concept is especially tricky (like those complex sentences), I might spend two weeks on one page: the first week they could make up silly sentences, and the second week the sentences would need to be about the book we were reading in class.
Here is an example of a lesson where I moved from talking about independent clauses and dependent clauses to creating complex sentences. Notice that this lesson is quick, teaches the concept simply, and gets the students immediately writing their own sentences.
Remember that an independent clause can stand by itself. Let's build one! Sarah, give me any noun.
"Ralph!" (Ralph, on the other side of the class, begins to blush.)
Sam, give me any verb.
"Farts!" (Now everyone is laughing, and I check to make sure Ralph is okay with this. He is, so we proceed.)
Perfect! Ralph farts. It's an independent clause. It can stand by itself. Now let's make one more independent clause.
Susie, give me another noun, any noun.
"Jerry." (Now Jerry, two rows in front of her, turns red.)
Jimmy, give me a noun.
"Poops." (Everyone is dying laughing, and I have written these two clauses on the board. Jimmy is totally fine with talking about potty things in class, so I'm good to go. One girl sneaks out her phone to video the class. I am laughing on the inside because she's probably going to post our grammar lesson on her social media.)
Now let's make one of those independent clauses dependent.
Rebecca, give me a subordinate conjunction. (Rebecca looks confused.) Remember those words that help us join sentences? I'm not talking about the FANBOY ones. You can find the chart for subordinate conjunctions on page 21 of A New Grammary. We wait while Rebecca flips to page 21. "So that!"
Great work! If we put a subordinate conjunction at the beginning of an independent clause, it becomes a dependent clause. Remember we talked about dependent clauses being like your two-year-old sibling. Do you want to leave your two-year-old sibling at the grocery store by themselves? No! Of course not! Bad things would definitely happen because your two-year-old sibling is dependent. He cannot stand alone.
I write "so that" between "Ralph farts" and "Jerry poops." We read the sentence, and everyone is laughing.
This is an example of an IC DC sentence. We do not need a comma. I change the sentence around. It reads, "So that Ralph farts, Jerry poops." Everyone is still laughing.
In this sentence we need a comma. This is an example of DC, IC.
Please write these two formulas on your paper and with a partner come up with another example for both, building them the same way we did as a class.
We then read through the examples that the students come up with in pairs, correcting where necessary. The homework will be to write three sentences, silly or not, with each of the two complex sentence formulas. I will take those papers up and mark them so that the students get some one-on-one instruction.
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