Learning Grammar the Right Way – Fix It! Grammar Review

The Institute for Excellence in Writing has been a staple in many homeshcools for years. I was delighted to learn that they had developed a comprehensive grammar program and was eager to see how it would work for my 4th grader.  We did the easy placement test online and found that the best place to start was at the beginning of the program with their first book, Fix It! Grammar: The Nose Tree. Though I felt we might be repeating some lessons per se, knowing the quality of IEW products made me feel confident that repetition would be the best in this case to ensure we were able to take advantage of the entire program if it worked out for us — and it certainly is working out for us!

The lessons are set up to be done several days a week in small increments. Each lessons lasts only about 15 minutes, depending upon your student, and build upon each other. The lessons are laid out in sections.

Day 1 – LEARN IT/FIX IT – This day the student learns the grammar lesson, reading over the explanation and learning a new grammar rule. Then the student can find the correlating grammar card in the back of the book. You can cut these out to review. My daughter wanted them in the book so she just found them in the back and then referred to it in the back of the book. But if you have a grammar folder you could keep them in there. Then student works through the sentence provided (one sentence each day) and marks things that they are asked to mark such as nouns, homophones, punctuation, etc. that are learned in the lessons. The student looks up any bolded vocabulary words. Then the teacher and student go over the sentence together and ensure everything is marked correctly. Then the student copies the CORRECT sentence into his or her notebook. DONE. Pretty easy, huh?

Day 2 – The student reads the sentence with you and marks it as described. He or she looks up any bolded words. After the sentence is gone over and determined to be correctly marked, the student copies the sentence correctly into their grammar notebook. DONE.

Day 3 – Repeat day 1 and 2. Don’t worry teachers, the definitions of the vocabulary words and the grammar rules to be mentioned and reviewed with the student are in the Teacher’s Guide. Done.

Day 4 – Repeat one more sentence, one more vocabulary word, one more rewrite. The completed paragraph is available in the teachers manual. You child has started their story.

Each week is a 4 day week and the lessons are short and sweet. And you even get handwriting and copywork practice – BONUS!

The Teacher’s Manual also has a glossary in the back to help you with grammar rules you need to refer to throughout the lessons. This is helpful if you are having trouble remembering how to explain a particular rule, which may not be a huge deal for you when you are going over nouns but in later books I’m better it will be great when you are going over present past participles and things like that.

We really enjoyed the lessons. The set up is easy to understand and, once your student figures out what the daily process is and how to go through the lessons, its very easy for them to do on their own, either you checking and going over rules and things that are missed. My daughter didn’t feel it was so daunting since she was able to complete the lessons in a minimal time slot and didn’t mind doing grammar. She LOVED that she was writing a story and sometimes wanted to move forward to see what was next, which I thought was nice motivation.  Overall, I thought the product was of the high caliber that I have come to know from IEW and look forward to continuing to use it in our homeschool. I would recommend this program to anyone wanting to include grammar lessons in their school day, as the lessons were easy to use, not time consuming, and interesting as well as chalk full of important grammar rules.

The Institute for Excellence in Writing’s Fix It! Grammar program is recommended for approximately 3rd grade and up. There is an excellent placement test online to help you determine where you need to begin in the series if you have older students who have studies grammar.  There are 6 books in the Fix it! Grammar series at this time.  Fix it! Grammar is available for purchase on the IEW website:

Fix It! Grammar: The Nose Tree [Book 1] (Teacher Manual) – 228 pages – $19.00
Fix It! Grammar: The Nose Tree [Book 1] (Student Book)  – 126 pages – $15.00

Check IEW and Fix it! Grammar on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, You Tube, and Vimeo.