I love grammar. I have loved it since I was little. My mother was an English teacher and she was always pointing out grammar in conversation or writing. Maybe that made an impression, I don’t know.
Grammar is so organized. I loved the way every word had a place when you diagrammed a sentence. When I lived in Germany, I loved learning not just the language but how it was organized, so differently than English (later, my inspiration for The Grammar Game). When I discovered Montessori, that was it for me. Organized and lots of grammar work! Those little symbols for each part of speech! So great! Plus, I loved the children, of course. I knew I’d found my place.
When we started Mandala, grammar was at the top of the list for me. As a new teacher, I did lots of grammar using all the traditional Montessori materials. But I found those materials didn’t reflect how interesting or thought-provoking grammar could be. Plus, Judy and I both wanted to tie grammar into reading and writing, making it practical and useful to both students and teachers.
The first grammar work we created and used was Literature for Grammar—passages from children’s literature that the students could analyze. Finding passages that would work with elementary students at varying age levels was tough. The lower level needed passages both easy to read and with only noun through preposition. That meant no pronouns! No I or you or her, etc. Was that even possible? Looking for the next two levels—those passages included all the parts of speech, but I never realized how much artistic license authors used.
Well, the students loved reading the passages and then the whole books. They definitely found the excerpts from books more interesting than made-up sentences. Now we just needed a template that was the right size for our papers. The first template we tried was made out of heavy duty white cardboard. Not too expensive and the right weight. But we learned when you used cardboard, you couldn’t see through it to know where to trace your symbol. So we searched for a type of plastic to use, not too thick or stiff, but transparent and durable. We found it, tested it for templates and that’s what we’ve used from then until today.
As you can see from this website, we have so many more grammar materials than just the Literature for Grammar. More to come on our continuing grammar discoveries.