Escape the drudgery of endless workbook grammar review by switching to The Great Editing Adventure series. If your children have already been studying grammar for a few years, and they have a handle on the basics of punctuation, spelling, and grammar, these books will provide plenty of material to review, reinforce, and stretch their learning.
In each book, there are 90 lessons, appropriate for grades 4 through 8, so each will provide either a year of lessons for every other day or a half-year with daily lessons. The lessons are derived from three complete short stories. For each lesson, the parent/teacher writes a few sentences from the story (in order) on a chalk or white board. (If you don't have time to get those sentences on the board each day, purchase the Student Activity Book, which has each day's sentences printed on a page. Underneath them are lines for students to write their corrected versions.)
The sentences contain grammatical (usage, parts of speech, capitalization, punctuation, etc.), structural (letter writing and addressing envelopes) and spelling errors that children must spot, vocabulary words with which they need to become familiar, and words for which they must discover synonyms.
The authors have covered language arts concepts typical for 4th through 6th grades. (The book functions as review material for grades 7 and 8.) Everything needed to present each lesson is contained within the teacher book for each volume, although students will need to have a dictionary and thesaurus handy. Answers as well as explanations are provided in the teacher book, so you can actually teach or reteach a concept that poses problems for a student without having to go elsewhere for assistance.
The stories themselves are entertaining, as you might guess from some of their titles: "Incredible Kooky Inventions," "The Adventures of a Sheep Named Bill," and "Around the World with the Roaming Detectives." Take a break from grammar texts for awhile and see if this isn't at least as effective and a lot more fun.
For high school students, you might want to try Great Explorations in Editing.
