12 yrs and up, $300.00, 14 week course (includes private tutorial time) – Prerequisite: a grasp of the basic parts of speech and their usage
[Parents: If helpful, you may request a placement quiz to determine if this course is a good fit for your child from Nicole Noster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). If they struggle with any of these concepts, we recommend taking Foundational Grammar first.]
This course is a bridge between Foundational Grammar and Intro to High School Writing, for students who are familiar with grammar basics but not quite ready for high school essays. It focuses on the more complex rules of grammar, covering clauses, phrases, and sentence structure and includes an introduction to the world of paragraph writing. Students will develop strong writing basics that will help them when they enter the high school stage of composition. This course does build upon the concepts of WISDOM's Foundational Grammar course, but it is not essential that Foundational Grammar is taken first if students already have a sufficient grasp of the basic parts of speech and their usage.
To ensure that each student understands the course as it progresses, student and tutor will have a private 15 minute tutorial once a week to review assignments together and clear up any questions the student might have. Each week there is a reading element, a new grammar concept, and a series of exercises and writing components to solidify understanding. A large part of absorbing and understanding grammatical concepts comes from seeing those concepts in action, through reading good literature, and then executing them in one's own writing.
Week 1: The 8 Parts of Speech (Part I) - Reading TBA by Hans Christian Andersen
- Nouns (Common or Proper, Concrete or Abstract, Collective, Singular or Plural, Compound)
- Verbs (Action, Helping, Linking)
- Adjectives (Descriptive, Proper, Limiting, Comparison, Irregular Comparison)
- Adverbs (How, Where, When, How Much, Comparison)
Week 2: The 8 Parts of Speech (Part II) - Reading: "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
- Pronouns (Pronouns and Antecedents, Personal, Reflexive, Relative, Interrogative, Demonstrative, Indefinite)
- Prepositions
- Conjunctions (Coordinating, Correlative, Subordinating)
- Interjections
Week 3: Verbs (Part I) - Reading TBA by Mark Twain
- Past, Present, & Future Tense
- The Perfect & Progressive Tenses
- Four Principal Parts
Week 4: Verbs (Part II) - Reading TBA by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Irregular Verbs
- Transitive or Intransitive Verbs
- Subjunctive Mood
Week 5: The Sentence - Reading: "Misery" by Anton Checkhov
- Two Parts of the Sentence
- Simple Subject, Simple Predicate
- Compound Subjects and Predicates
- Reversed Subject and Predicate
- Split Predicate
Week 6: Phrases and Clauses - Reading: "The Third Ingredient" by O. Henry
- Independent & Dependant Clauses
- Phrases (Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, Appositives; Adjective, Adverb, and Noun Clauses)
- Complete Sentences, Fragments, and Run-On Sentences
Week 7: Objects - Reading TBA by G. K. Chesterton
- Direct & Indirect Objects
- Predicate Nominative & Predicate Adjective
- Noun and Pronoun Case (Nominative, Objective, Possessive)
Week 8: Odds & Ends - Reading: "Babette’s Feast" by Isak Dinesen
- Gerunds, Infinitives, & Participles
Week 9: The Paragraph AND Sentence Structure - Reading: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber
- Simple, Compound, & Complex Sentences
- Compound-Complex Sentence
- Parallel Structure
Week 10: Topic Sentences AND Sentence Punctuation (Part I) - Reading: "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson
- The Period
- The Exclamation Mark
- The Question Mark
Week 11: Supporting Sentences: examples, facts, definitions AND Punctuation (Part II) - Reading: "The Jockey" by Carson McCullers
- The Comma
- The Apostrophe
Week 12: Supporting sentences: anecdotes, arguments, analogies AND Punctuation (Part III) - Reading: "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury
- The Hyphen (Compound Nouns, Fractions, Numbers, Word Division)
- The Dash
- The Semicolon & the Colon
Week 13: Supporting sentences: contrasts, cause and effect AND Subject-Verb Agreement - Reading: TBA by Flannery O’Connor
Week 14: Concluding Sentences AND Active or Passive Voice - Reading: "Unstuck" by John Updike
