I bought this book years ago, when I had entertained the idea of homeschooling my child. That did not happen. I decided to read through the book, however, when I found that many of my students (college level) do not know English grammar very well. I don't mean they make grammar mistakes in their own language, but that they can't identify a verb tense or distinguish between an adjective and a noun very easily. Since I teach Russian language, I thought maybe I could use some techniques from this book to help my students grasp how words work in an English sentence to help them in constructing Russian sentences (which is an inflected language).

I soon saw that this book was useless for my purposes, but I find the approach to teaching young children grammar very interesting. It is not a "new" approach, in fact--it is very old-fashioned. Jessie Wise uses memorization as the main tool. The child, with the help of the parent, memorizes the definitions of grammatical categories (noun, adjective, verb, sentence, etc.), terms, lists. By the end of the book (which contains 200 lessons that are to be covered in two years), the child can recognize and define all the parts of the sentence.

What is new about this approach is how Ms. Wise goes about it. Every lesson is scripted: what the parent says, how many times he/she must say it, how many times the child must repeat after the parent, activities for the child to do. Lest this sound incredibly boring for both parties, I must say Ms. Wise has done a fine job of keeping up momentum with each lesson. Yes, every lesson starts with a "repeat after me 3 times" rote learning of a definition or rule, but then is followed by exercises that are kinetic (the child must respond physically either acting out the words, or going around the house finding examples), or engage a child's imagination (reading fairy tales and then finding the verbs, acting out the verbs, or drawing pictures of events in the story, looking at pictures and creating a narrative about it). Activities include dictation, drawing, writing letters, giving oral descriptions and reading aloud. The lessons are generally short (probably about 15 -30 minutes per lesson depending on the activities) and progress in sort of a spiral fashion--moving forward and reviewing at the same time.
I have to say that I think memorization has gotten short-shrift in our generation. I think I had to memorize one poem in all my elementary school years. This book has the child memorize 10 poems by the end of the lessons, and read another 12, all of them wonderful. The book teaches them, step by step, how to memorize things (which we also don't teach our children in schools). As a building block of critical thinking, being able to identify and remember facts, to put things in categories and know what order things go in, memorization has a place. I don't know how one would translate her teaching methods into a classroom (this is geared towards the homeschooler), but I think she is onto something important here. ( )

My son and I didn't get far with this book; for some reason, we both were uninspired by the exercises. The poetry and stories he was asked to read and/or memorize were boring (much easier to just find appropriate materials by well-known poets and authors and work with those). So, we gave up on this book only a few chapters in. Possibly it would be a good system for another family; it just wasn't the right fit for us. ( )

Excellent book, perfect especially for the auditory learner.

I highly recommend the companion CD with the poems and jingles. My daughters listen to it everyday for pleasure! ( )

I thought it was a good book but a little on the dry side. ( )

Well laid out grammar lessons for young children (K-2 ages, I'd say). The lessons are short, generally no more than 15 - 20 minutes, and are completely scripted for the instructor. But you can use them as a guideline if you like to do your own thing. There's lots of repetition for reinforcement. ( )