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Grammar 6 Introduction

Welcome

In this program, your family will dig deeper into cracking the grammatical code that creates the foundation and structure of our language. This program provides grammatical practice made practical—we teach grammar directly from materials your children read, and help them apply it back to their writing.

Included in this Program

Grammar 6 Answer Guide

The Answer Guide, found directly after this page, provides instructional information for and answers to the Activity Sheet exercises. The Answer Guide usually contains the same information as your children's Activity Sheets, though at times we have summarized the main points of the instructional F.Y.I. section as an F.Y.I. Synopsis in the Answer Guide.

Grammar 6 Activity Sheets

This program meets your children on familiar ground. The separate book of Activity Sheets use passages from age-appropriate books as the backdrop to the grammatical skills we teach each day.

Passages
Every Activity Sheet opens with a Passage from a great book written at the reading level appropriate for a Sonlight Level 6 student. While these passages may come from books your children read, they do not align to any reading schedule in any of our other Sonlight Instructor's Guides.

Grammatical Instruction
Some Activity Sheets contain an F.Y.I. section that formally introduces a grammatical topic or concept used in the Activity Sheet exercises. The F.Y.I. Synopsis in the Answer Guide summarizes the main points of the Activity Sheet's F.Y.I.

When a passage provides the opportunity for a bonus grammar lesson, we will occasionally introduce a topic in the beginning of a question.

Exercises
Your children then practice these grammar concepts we've taught through the Activity Sheet Exercises. Do not feel obligated to complete every question on every Activity Sheet. Feel free to adjust and/or omit activities to meet the needs of your children. We cover the same concepts repeatedly throughout the year to enable your children to learn “naturally” through repetition and practice over time.

Resources
The final portion of this program is a Resource section that contains two handy tools. The first is a List of Standard Symbols, which is a key to the abbreviations we ask your children to use as they mark up the daily passages. The List of Standard Symbols is also located in the front of your child's Activity Sheet book for easy reference. The second is the Grammar Guide—a concise resource that contains explanations of grammatical topics and examples.

We use various symbols on the Skills Matrix to show when we both present and practice topics throughout the year. Please find the Skills Matrix toward the end of the Resource section for more information.

How to Schedule this Program

This program contains 72 Activity Sheets—enough for you to complete two Activity Sheets per week for a 36 week school year.

Important Note: Activity Sheets 45-48 use Passages from the book The Samurai’s Tale. If you plan to read this book this year but haven’t finished it when you reach these Activity Sheets, consider saving the sheets to complete later in the year as the Passages may give away the plot of the story. If you decide to save the sheets for later, please review the topics we introduce on those pages on your own. Your children will likely encounter questions about them on subsequent pages.

How to Begin

Before you begin each day, please check the Mom or Dad: section of the Answer Guide notes to make sure we haven’t asked you to introduce a grammatical topic on your own. If we have, please review the brief instruction and examples we provide in the Grammar Guide in the Resource section with your children before they begin the Activity Sheet. If the Activity Sheet contains an F.Y.I. section of instruction, you may want to read through it with your children to better answer any questions they may have.

Sonlight’s Language Arts 6 Users

To use with the Sonlight Language Arts 6 program, choose one of the options below: Complete these Activity Sheets in place of the Grammar Ace assignments scheduled each week.

—OR—

Use these Activity Sheets on Day 2 and Day 4 each week.

—OR—

Use the dictation passage from the regular Language Arts 6 activity sheet on Day 1, then complete the Grammar 6 Activity Sheet afterwards. Add the second Grammar 6 Activity Sheet as it best fits your schedule on Days 2-5. Note: We deliberately do not link the dictation assignments in this program to the books you read.

Dictation
If you plan to pair these Activity Sheets with our Language Arts 6 program, we recommend you use the passage included in the Language Arts Instructor’s Guide as they correspond with your children’s weekly reading assignments.

However, if you would like your children to have more interaction with the text they will use for grammatical analysis, use the passages on the Grammar 6 Activity Sheets instead for the dictation portion of your Language Arts instruction. You may find that your children have an easier time picking the passages apart if they’ve had a little time to hear and read through them prior to working on the Grammar Activity Sheets.

So Why Learn Grammar Anyway?

Our language is a code—seemingly arbitrary sounds are fitted together into words, sentences and paragraphs. When we learn grammar, we learn how those pieces of sounds and words fit together and interact with one another. We begin to see how those elements work together in the language we write and speak daily. We learn to decipher the code, and we improve as writers because of it.

We found a comment in A. W. Tozer’s The Size of the Soul: Principles of Revival and Spiritual Growth that we thought put the study of Language Arts in an eternal light. Hopefully your children will find these thoughts helpful the next time they appear to need a reason to excel at Language Arts:

"For the very reason that God has committed His saving truth to the receptacle of human language, the man who preaches that truth should be more than ordinarily skillful in the use of language. It is necessary that every artist master his medium, every musician his instrument. For a man calling himself a concert pianist to appear before an audience with but a beginner’s acquaintance with the keyboard would be no more absurd than for a minister of the gospel to appear before his congregation without a thorough knowledge of the language in which he expects to preach." [pp. 41-42]

In other words, those of us who want to share God’s eternal truths should be more than ordinarily skillful in the use of the language in which we want to communicate.

Tozer’s thoughts on mastering the medium of language were echoed by John Piper in an article titled “A Compelling Reason for Rigorous Training of the Mind”:

"...[A] basic and compelling reason for education—the rigorous training of the mind—is so that a person can read the Bible with understanding... This is an overwhelming argument for giving our children a disciplined and rigorous training in how to think an author’s thoughts after him from a text—especially a biblical text. An alphabet must be learned, as well as vocabulary, grammar, syntax, the rudiments of logic, and the way meaning is imparted through sustained connections of sentences and paragraphs."

Of the limitless gifts God has bestowed upon us, one of the most precious is undoubtedly our language. May we never underestimate its power to transmit the good news of God’s Word. Remember the reaction of the residents of Jerusalem when Ezra and Nehemiah revived the tradition of reading the Law aloud in the open square:

"And all the people went their way to eat and drink, to send portions and rejoice greatly, because they understood the words that were declared to them." [Nehemiah 8:12]

Let us be faithful servants who appreciate and seek to master our medium: His precious gift of language.

—Note by Duane Bolin and Amber Densmer