Part one of my review of Michael C. Thompson’s Language Arts
curriculum give an overview of the elementary series (the first
three books) and how my boys and I have found it valuable to our
homeschooling. This portion discusses in more depth our
experience of the grammar and poetics books. I enjoy grammar. My
first experience with formal grammar and sentence diagramming
came in seventh grade, my first year in a Catholic school, and
having had almost no grammar prior to that class, I was forced
into the deep end from the start. No dipping toes into the
shallow end, spending weeks on each part of speech or part of
the sentence. My teacher dove in, knowing most of the class had
years of grammar exposure. And thank goodness she did. Seeing
all the parts at once and learning how to parse them on lines,
angled and straight, made the function of each part of speech
more clear, I feel, than presenting them one-by-one. Give me the
whole picture, please, then let me digest. That’s how Thompson’s
grammar series works. I