It is important for children to have a solid foundation in grammar in order to be excellent writers, which is why I was excited to receive Easy Grammar: Grade 1 from Easy Grammar Systems to use with my son.

Grammar is one of those skills that is often overlooked as unimportant, but is actually the basis for writing. Students who have strong grammar skills tend to write better, which is important as they advance in their academic career and all of their work turns into essays.

Overview:

I received the Easy Grammar: Grade 1 Teacher’s Edition Book. The Teacher’s Edition book can also be used as a student workbook and contains everything you need to teach grammar for the entire school year.

The Easy Grammar Systems book consists of 5-10 minute daily lessons. Each lesson is designed for students to gain mastery on grammar skills.

The book includes a Scope and Sequence which explains where each concept is discussed. This is a good reference tool especially if you are using another reading program that also includes a grammar component.

There is also a Suggestion and Comment section that clearly helps you teach grammar in an easy way.

At the end of the book is an answer key that you can use to quickly check your child’s work. I like that it is similar to a regular workbook that a child already used it.

How We Used It:

It is hard to teach grammar, so I liked the fact that I had a book that specifically taught my son grammar.

There are 180 lessons in the book, one for each school day. The pages are reproducible so that you can copy them, or you can just have your child write in them.

I chose to have my son just write in the book since it was much easier to use it as a workbook then have something to copy daily.

Lesson Overview:

Each lesson includes the following sections:

Capitalization- students must capitalize a word in the sentence.

Punctuation- students have to practice using punctuation.

Lesson- a short mini-lesson.

Sentence- students will trace or write the words in the sentence. I like that how as the lessons progress, the sentence section becomes sentence combining. There are two sentences listed, and students have to combine them to make one sentence. This is helpful for teaching writing skills as well.

Areas for improvement:

The only suggestion I have for the book is to have pictures. Since it is designed for first grade, I would have thought there would be more pictures to describe the topics. For example, when describing nouns to use a picture of a person, place or thing.

The font could have also been a bit bigger if you are teaching your child to read the directions.

Overall:

I liked how easy it was to teach grammar. Although the lessons were short, which my son loved, I liked the fact that I was teaching important concepts each day. Also, the lessons were review, so each concept is touched on multiple times.

All in all, this is a simple way to introduce grammar to your student without all of the headache of piecing it together.