BJU Press Blog

grammar

Grammar Tools to Boost Your Child’s Writing Ability

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grammar tools for NaNoWriMo
The beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is just a few days away. Have you thought about using the NaNoWriMo challenge in your homeschool? Have you made any preparations? If you have, you may be concerned about whether your child is grammatically ready to write a whole novel in a month’s time. But tools you can use will make the process a little bit easier. Consider using these free online grammar tools over the next month.

Before Writing: Reviewing Concepts with AfterSchoolHelp

You know your children best, and if you have one who struggles with a specific grammar issue, then sending him or her to BJU Press’s AfterSchoolHelp site might be a good solution. BJU Press developed AfterSchoolHelp as a digital tutor for math, but it has since expanded to include resources for language arts and Spanish, as well. On AfterSchoolHelp.com, you can have your child watch review videos and complete practice activities on specific concepts. AfterSchoolHelp offers activities that correlate with BJU Press textbooks in Grades 4–12.

During Writing: Using Grammarly

Many people use Grammarly as a tool for checking grammar, spelling, and writing style. Grammarly works both as an app that you can use on a browser or phone and as a proofreading service. Once you create an account, you can upload whole documents to be checked. The program will mark potential errors for your child’s consideration, with a brief explanation of the rule related to the error. Like many such tools, it’s never perfectly accurate, and your child will have to think carefully about the suggested revisions.

After Writing: Assessing and Developing Skills with Quill

Quill.org is a web-based resource designed for teachers to use in the classroom, but it’s also free for you to use in your homeschool. In order for it to work, you will need to create one account for you as the parent/teacher and another for each child as a student. Quill offers a proofreading practice tool that your children can use to prepare for editing a novel. In proofreading activities, the students correct example papers. Once they’ve finished making corrections, the system will evaluate the changes made. It then provides practice activities based on the items missed. This can be especially helpful for children who want to improve their writing after completing a novel. And there are many other resources included in Quill that you may find helpful in developing your children’s writing abilities.

Remember, NaNoWriMo is all about the drafting process. If you want your children to participate in it, or get as many words written as they can, they won’t be able to stop to think about grammar. So these tools will be most effective when used for preparation, overcoming specific grammar-related roadblocks, and for improving overall writing ability.

English 2: Developing Young Writers

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Writing has always been one of my favorite things to do. My mother would transcribe oral stories I retold as a preschooler. (It’s true! You can read about it here.) Then when I was in the elementary grades, we would “publish” a book each year as a compilation of all my homeschool writing projects. I loved sharing my stories, haikus, and book reports with adults. It made me feel important when they would comment on my work.

Now when I learn about a new language arts textbook that teaches children why writing is valuable and shows them how to do it successfully, I get pretty excited! The new edition of English 2 is one such textbook. It brings together both the writing and grammar elements that your child needs to be an effective communicator for God’s glory. Included in the English 2 Subject Kit are the following pieces.

Student Worktext

The strength of this student worktext is in its alternating chapters of grammar and writing instruction. You can read more about how the BJU Press elementary English curriculum builds a solid foundation with this approach. There’s also a strong biblical worldview connection between understanding what God communicates through language and how your child can use this gift to serve God and love others.

It appeals to visual learners with the cheerful colors, consistent icons, and engaging activities that prompt critical thinking. The illustrations are done by some of my favorite in-house artists and capture interest on each page.

The student worktext also provides hands-on learners with writing project examples to use as models and grammar exercise pages to practice new skills.

You can get a more detailed look at the grammar and writing chapters when you watch my English 2 walkthrough video.

Grammar focus: These chapters develop critical thinking skills as new concepts are introduced and applied in exercises. Each chapter follows the same model: learn, apply, and review. Also included are journal pages where your child has the opportunity to do some free writing without the constraints of a specific project and without receiving a grade.

Writing projects: These chapters come in between the grammar ones so that your child is prepared to use correct grammar needed for his projects. We introduce literature links to some published works as real-life examples. The five-step writing process and sample writings provide a framework to follow so that your child knows the step-by-step process for completing his goal—whether it’s a poem, personal narrative, letter, or research report.

Teacher’s Edition

This book takes your child’s learning to another level while simplifying your life at the same time! It shows materials needed for each lesson, provides questions and prompts to engage your child, and gives you all the answers for each student worktext page in one easy-to-find location—right within the reduced student pages for the corresponding lesson. View the teaching resources and Chapter 1 of the English 2 Teacher’s Edition.

Tests and Answer Keys

These two pieces provide the assessments your child takes to gauge his understanding of the concepts being taught as well as the correct answers for you to measure your child’s comprehension. They also offer you suggestions for grading.

Explore all the BJU Press English and Writing & Grammar subject kits on our website.

Writing and Grammar—Two Halves of One Whole

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For a busy parent, with everything that has to be completed in one homeschool day, teaching writing and grammar is a lot of work. It might seem to make more sense for you to handle these two related subjects as separate classes, or to spend one semester on grammar and the next on writing. So why does BJU Press put them together in the curriculum? Because writing and grammar are two halves of the same whole. Studying grammar helps your child become a better writer, while studying writing helps your child understand grammar. Here are a few reasons why.

Writing and Grammar—Two Halves of One Whole

  • Writing Skills and Grammar Skills

Writing assignments give your child a place to apply the grammar skills he’s just learned. It’s easy for a student to recognize and fix a problem he’s just learned about when looking at a list of sentences that follow a certain formula. The real test of understanding is expecting him to recognize and correct the problem in his own writing. But the reverse is also true—grammar skills improve writing. Writers need a certain level of grammatical understanding in order to be able to communicate effectively. For example, punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence entirely, as in the old joke about the trigger-happy panda that “eats, shoots and leaves.”

  • Analytical and Conceptual

People tend to be either analytical or conceptual. Grammar is an analytical skill, and children who favor logical processes tend to do well with grammar. On the other hand, writing is highly conceptual. There are fewer hard-and-fast rules for writing, and children who tend to be conceptual thinkers are likely to succeed in writing. Studying writing and grammar together gives both kinds of thinkers opportunities to use their strengths and improve their weaknesses.

  • Objective and Subjective

Since  writing is so conceptual, it can also be frustratingly subjective to assess, but this subjectivity leaves room for leniency in grading. When I was teaching writing, I would often ask myself whether lack of sentence variety or overuse of weak verbs really deserved a lower grade even though everything else was well done. But you know your own child’s strengths and weaknesses. If your child enjoys writing but doesn’t excel at spelling or grammar (the objective part), you can choose to value the writing section (the subjective part) of the rubric over the grammar section. If your child does well grammatically but doesn’t write as well, then you can choose to emphasize the grammar section of the rubric. This gives you the flexibility to evaluate your child based on his strengths rather than his weaknesses.

At BJU Press, we teach writing and grammar together all the way from grade 2 through grade 12. Check out our whole line of English-Writing and Grammar textbooks!

Teaching Grammar the “Write” Way

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Teaching Grammar

Do your children dread the part of the day devoted to writing and grammar? Maybe they have trouble seeing the correlation between grammar and good writing, or maybe they view grammar as boring, impractical, and repetitive. Before college, I felt the same way. So how did I end up with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English? It all started with a different approach to the subject.

English was my least favorite subject in high school. It was hour after hour of workbooks, rules, and more exceptions than rules. Once I turned in a short story that I had spent hours writing and was disappointed in my grade, not because it wasn’t higher but because it was based solely on the fact that I hadn’t made many spelling errors. In contrast to the drudgery of English, math class was exciting, fun, and challenging.

I left for college excited about being a math major. Reluctantly, I also signed up for the first of three required college English classes. In that class, I began learning some new things. I found out that I could arrange paragraphs in a way that made my argument more convincing. I realized that I could replace linking verbs with action verbs to give my essay strength and vitality. I caught on that writing poetry was more than just finding words that rhymed. My papers were graded on content as well as spelling. I started to love English, and I discovered that I was actually more competent in that area than in mathematics.

Maybe your children share my pre-college feelings about writing and grammar. But the good news is that by using two helpful teaching methods, induction and integration, you can interest your children in English and improve their long-term comprehension of grammar.

Induction

Deduction starts with a general rule, from which you make specific applications. For example, you can give your child a list of auxiliaries (helping verbs) and tell him that be, have, and do can also be used as main verbs; then he can underline all the auxiliaries in an exercise.

Induction, on the other hand, is examining specifics and then creating a general rule. To teach inductively, you would give your child several sample sentences with verbs and auxiliaries and then let him generate his own list of auxiliaries. Using this list, he would determine which auxiliaries could also be used as main verbs. Induction allows children the opportunity to investigate or discover something themselves, stimulating their curiosity and their eagerness to learn more.

Integration

To give the facts of grammar a real-life context, integrate your grammar lessons with writing, vocabulary, literature, and speech. Your child could compose a piece of writing and then revise it, changing the passive-voice verbs to active voice and noting the difference in tone. Ask your child to explain why some sentences should remain passive and why others sound better in active voice.

Maybe your child does not like grammar, or maybe he learns quickly and becomes bored. With inductive activities and creative writing assignments, you can spark interest and improve long-term comprehension. Remember that language is a gift from God, unique to beings created in His image, so it’s important to understand it and use it well. Using a fresh approach to grammar might even reveal some hidden talents. Who knows? Your reluctant grammar student could turn out to be an English major or a writer someday.

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Written by Dana G.

Learning the Value of Grammar Lessons

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photograph of a bored female student sitting at a table with piles of homework

Many high schoolers question the usefulness of studying grammar. I know I did.

My parents started homeschooling when I was in seventh grade. I was a good student and had stayed on the honor roll throughout elementary school. I loved learning and generally spent my spare time either reading or typing out stories on my family’s computer. I enjoyed my distance-learning history and literature classes enough that I often watched the videos twice. But I loathed the English class in the distance-learning program that my parents chose.

During that class, I rarely paid attention, choosing instead to either doodle in the back of my notebook, write stories, or get a head start on the evening’s homework assignment.

I had several reasons for disliking English. Minor reasons included the fact that the teacher on the videos was annoying, the textbook was visually uninteresting, and I never felt like I learned anything new. But the main reason that I hated the class was that the content seemed useless.  The distance-learning program that we used (not BJU Press) was effective at drilling the course content into my head, but it failed to answer my burning question of why the content should be learned in the first place.

It wasn’t until a few years later when I took a missions trip to Micronesia that I began to understand the usefulness of grammar. That summer, I traveled with some friends and spent almost a month on Majuro, the main island of the Marshall Islands with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, who were missionaries there. During our stay, my uncle gave us daily lessons in Marshallese. I had expected to learn a collection of useful Marshallese phrases such as “How are you?” “How much does it cost?” and “Where is the restroom?” Instead, we talked about things like pronouns and verb tenses and where to place adjectives in relation to nouns. All those grammar exercises in English class were finally coming in handy! I was so thankful that I knew the “lingo” of language. I knew what adjectives and pronouns were, and I knew the role they played in sentence structure. That knowledge helped me immensely, and I was able to learn quite a bit of Marshallese during that brief time.

Three years later, I was a sophomore in college taking an expository writing class and learning another use for all those grammar exercises. That semester, my professor used a lot of terms like gerunds, participles, and nominative absolutes as he tried to challenge us to experiment with sentence structure to create compelling prose. Again, I was thankful for those years of studying grammar. I knew the terms as well as the concepts, and that knowledge was helping me become a better writer.

Seeing grammar at work in the real world got me excited. I was beginning to see grammar not as a tool for torturing students but as an essential part of producing clear, God-honoring communication. I realized students needed to be taught grammar through this worldview lens. And I decided that I wanted to teach them. This former English-class-hater actually ended up pursuing a master’s degree in English education.

In the providence of God, I’m not currently teaching grammar in a classroom. I’m a stay-at-home mom with three daughters. But someday soon I will begin teaching them the fundamentals of English grammar. And from the very beginning, they will know its value.