Overwhelmed With English Grammar?
Challenged by English Grammar or Sentence Writing?
Does your child come home and struggle with an English grammar assignment? Does your child write short paragraphs that contain short sentences? Does your child have trouble writing a sentence?
A number of years ago one of my 6th grade students was really struggling with his English grammar homework. He had the typical assignment of underlining the subject of the sentence once and the verb of the sentence twice. That was hard for him.
The second part of the assignment was to put a box around the direct object and circle the subjective complement in the sentence. This totally stymied him. He didn’t even know what a subjective complement was. It was completely beyond him! And, then the third set of sentences in his assignment told him to identify the indirect object. English all of a sudden was a foreign language as far as he was concerned.
He threw up his arms and declared, “Who cares? And why is any of this important anyway?”
The fact is good writers use a variety of sentence types in their writing. When you are aware of the different types of sentences and use different types of sentences in your writing, your writing is more interesting. Understanding how we put words together into the different types of sentences also helps you to write more clearly. You don’t have partial sentences or run-on sentences. Instead, you have clear concise sentences.
Read more about The Sentence Zone
Did you know your child can improve their writing in minutes by just changing a few words?
Often when your child comes home with their writing assignment they don’t want to have to do anything more than absolutely necessary to get it done. But, they may need some help on how to format their paper, or need a little bit of advice on how to make their paper better, or how to write a work cited or bibliography.
You know they just need a little something extra to help give them confidence with their writing assignments. It was the same thing for me. My children and students didn’t need a ton of help. What they did need was a quick and easy, down and dirty guide to remind them of the paragraph, letter, and essay formats.
I knew my kids and students would need to be able to independently fix their papers because they wouldn’t always have someone else available to proof them. They also needed a quick reference resource to guide them in how to make small changes to their papers to really improve them. I had shown them an example of how just changing the verb in their sentences their overall writing improved. But then they couldn’t always think of additional verbs on their own.
- Write more interesting sentences.
- Write clear and understandable paragraphs & essays.
- Make good word choices and improve their vocabulary.
- Write a bibliography/works cited.
- Write the Four Basic Essays.
