In a message of , Sharon Davis (1:138/239) writes: 
 >I recently went to the local curriculum fair.  One of the presenters was
 >the author/developer of Writing Strands.  (One writing program I am very
 >interested in.)  As an English teacher, he found the public school
 >writing program sorely lacking.  He taught his son writing but   didn't
 >teach him ANY grammar.   This son has developed into quite a talented
 >writer.  (He figured if a child could learn to talk effectively without
 >knowing what a verb or noun is, then he could also write without knowing
 >the names the parts of speech.)
 >Have you come across anyone who uses this approach?  Writing Strands has
 >received high recommendations, but is grammar *really* necessary?  (I
 >certainly can see the need when studying a foreign language.)
I doubt that grammar is REALLY necessary as an exercise unto itself.  Our 
exposure to good speech and good literature accomplishes what we REALLY use - 
if it sounds funny or ungainly, it needs reworking.  We ended up reading 
grammar because I mentioned that people had examined languages and found they 
had similar rules, that even the gorilla Koko uses grammar to convey meaning 
and that different kinds of words had names.  By exploring the names in the 
dictionary, we ended up talking about word origins.  We talked about reading 
aloud and how important the punctuation was as traffic signals to the reader. 
 And I'll bet that if we learned a foriegn language in an organic way (living 
amidst it) that grammar per se would again be as irrelevant as it was learnig 
our first language.  Knowing grammar DOES allow you to talk about the 
communication more efficiently, just as knowing any technical language 
(medical terminology, legal phrases, DOS, mathematical symbols) helps in 
their own fields.   
We all know the bits and pieces of these special l;anguages that we need to 
knwo for our purposes and forget the ones we learned and didn't need.  Is 
grammar necessary to learn in and of itself - what you need it for is the 
only answer I know.  And it may be that proving homeschooling is viable to 
your mother-in-law requires a working knowledge would be your sufficient 
ed.
Cindy in Wisconsin, 25 degrees cooler than Indianapolis this morning
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