English Grammar 1

Course Description

Grammar is foundational to good writing, but—too often—it is a stumbling block for students and families. In this class, students will see how understanding sentence structure can improve their writing, and that there are sensible rules which govern everything from the placement of commas to matching verb case. In this case, we’ll focus on the logic of grammar, real-world examples, and lots of practice. The English Grammar mini-courses consist of live, synchronous classes once a week, as well as online activities to practice and master course skills. Is your student brand new to grammar or do you want a brief refresher? Minicourses are a great time to focus intentionally on grammar so that the student is better prepared for high school level English classes.

In Level 1, geared for 6th-7th graders, students will focus on the following: • Nouns, including common and proper nouns and capitalization; personal pronouns including pronoun agreement; and subjects, which are usually nouns or pronouns, including simple, compound, complete subjects. • Verbs, including basic and perfect tenses, and predicates, including: simple, compound, complete predicates; identifying fragments and simple sentences; subject/predicate agreement; and identifying a verb as being helping, action, or linking. • Identifying adjectives and adverbs, using them to add color and variety to sentences; positive, comparative, and superlative forms of adjectives & adverbs and using form; and adverb sentence starters to improve writing. • Prepositional phrases, including: the object of the preposition; prepositions that aren’t actually acting as prepositions; separating prepositional phrases since the subject/predicate/complement will not be in one; and using prepositional phrases as sentence starters to improve writing. • Finding verb complements (direct object and indirect object, if there is one) of an action verb; and finding the subject complements (predicate adjective or predicate noun) for a linking verb. • Understanding the difference between a phrase and a clause; an introduction to conjunctions; identifying independent and dependent clauses; and identifying types of sentences (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory). • Diagramming simple sentences, including: subject and predicate, compound subjects/predicates, direct objects, indirect objects, and adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. • Punctuation marks, including: end punctuation, basic commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, and italics.