APS elementary — what grade do they start grammar?

[Anonymous]

I don’t recall much grammar in elementary beyond punctuation, parts of speech, etc. There definitely was grammar instruction in middle school, though.
Though immersion Spanish language arts in grades 7-8 was MUCH more robust than MS English… reading lots of books, writing essays, long term projects, oral presentations, lots of grammar, etc. In English they read a book or two & didn’t write much. They did use some app for grammar lessons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If they aren’t learning spelling and grammar, what ARE they learning?!

These are foundational skills! 🤯

Seriously not as much as they should, if anything, on any given day. APS has mainstreamed classrooms and unless you're at the failing level, your kids are on their own for the most part. At least it was at our elementary school. I volunteered for reading and science lessons often and talked to a lot of parents so I pretty much knew many of the teachers and the abilities and behavior of most of the kids. I'm not saying this with absolute confirmation or conviction but what I realized after a few years was that they seemed to deliberately take a "one of each type of student in each class" in the grade approach when they assigned classes. We have all the yearbooks and looking through them, it seemed to be a pattern of social engineering and not best practices for academic learning. A similar Girl:Boy ratio is accepted as common sense these days, I guess. But they separated the gifted kids into small cohorts that each class had. They separated all the SPED kids. They even put a few of the bullies in each class to make sure none of the classes would be functional. One thing interesting was that the only exception was that they often seemed to put many of the AA kids in the same class of a grade -- so not sure if this was a student comfort thing or something else entirely.

[Anonymous]

SAT prep is often when kids get their first good instruction in grammar.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thanks!

High school kids these days can barely write a proper sentence of longer than 5 words. If you have the means (personally or financially), teach your kids yourself or pay someone else (beginning informally) as early as Kindergarten or first grade. My kids have pretty much not gotten any actual meaningful grammar lessons up to and including high school at various APS schools. One previous high school English class the kids basically didn't read even one entire book from cover to cover. They read select chapters of a handful and watched a bunch (at least once a week) of "thematic" movies and shows that covered whatever theme they were working on. They barely had to write anything. And the teacher constantly made grammar and spelling mistakes that it's hard to blame the old "typo" much like an Hollywood actor can't say their Instagram account was hacked again. Another high school history class, more time was spent on coloring, making ppt slides, and designing fake social media pages than actually writing essays. It's the problem of having general ed classrooms inclusive of illiterate students.

DP. I can honestly say we've had almost the exact same experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If they aren’t learning spelling and grammar, what ARE they learning?!

These are foundational skills! 🤯

Excellent question!
I have one graduated and one graduating this year. I still find it an excellent question.
Folks, unless your kids take AP, they are getting less than the bare minimum. Even at the AP level, it can be inconsistent and very teacher-dependent. I am so tired of receiving so many teacher/school/APS messages with typos and just plain mistakes.

[Anonymous]

My kid used some online program that was super simple and didn't really teach anything.

[Anonymous]

Hahahaha. My high schoolers who are very driven kids taking rigorous course load have learned close to zero grammar in APS. Sat prep and mom lecturing them at dinner is the only grammar they’ve learned. Oh. And Spanish. They’ve learned a lot about grammar through Spanish. It’s insane. Grammar is no longer in vogue. Which is bizarre to me because it’s how I learned to write.

[Anonymous]

My DS had grammar starting in first grade at ATS. Sadly I think he had more instruction
on grammar at ATS than he does at his middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DS had grammar starting in first grade at ATS. Sadly I think he had more instruction
on grammar at ATS than he does at his middle school.

What grammar curriculum did they use?

[Anonymous]

7th!!!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If they aren’t learning spelling and grammar, what ARE they learning?!

These are foundational skills! 🤯

Agree. Maybe this is why ATS is so popular…

[Anonymous]

Never. My 8th grader is a horrendous writer. They also don’t learn vocab which is an issue as we are applying for private high schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid used some online program that was super simple and didn't really teach anything.

Lexia?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they aren’t learning spelling and grammar, what ARE they learning?!

These are foundational skills! 🤯

Agree. Maybe this is why ATS is so popular…

If ATS is so great, why aren’t the ATS kids blowing everyone out of the water in middle school? My kid says he has a couple of ATS grads in his (lower track) math class, and they aren’t very good.