IEW: Fix It! Grammar Review Level 3 and Level 4

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We are very familiar with Institute for Excellence in Writing as it’s a staple in our home. Aside from using the Structure and Style Level with my Upper Elementary kid, we’ve also used the older, Third Edition, Fix-It! Grammar in our home. So, I was especially pleased to get the opportunity to review the new and updated, Fourth Edition (January 2022) Robin Hood – Level 3, for grades 6-8, and Mowgli and Shere Khan – Level 4 for grades 6-8 with the Fix It! Grammar Cards.

Details:

Grade Level/Age: (Recommended)
Robin Hood – Level 3, grades 6-8 and Mowgli and Shere Khan – Level 4, grades 6-8

Parts of Speech
Capitalization
Clauses
Homophones/Usage
Stylistics Techniques

Everything that was covered in priors books will be revisited in Book 4, discussed more in-depth and new concepts were added.

For a deeper comparison, check out Scope and Sequence for Level 3 and Level 4.

Parent Involvement: Some involvement. Not completely hands-off. On the first day of the week, you will discuss the new lessons and concepts with your child and depending on your child’s needs, you will either sit alongside him or just check-in.

Schedule/Lessons: Its a 30 week / 4 days a week curriculum. Each week gets incrementally more challenging. I would say approximately 15-minute lessons.

Product Format: Physical Products – Both Teacher Manual and Student Pages: Please note: Student pages will no longer be available in PDF format. **Might be an issue with families with multiple kids**

Costs: Teacher/Student Manual bundle $29 or separately at $19 for each book.

How Does it Work? (5 steps)

✏️ Learn It! This will be the introduction of the new concept for the week; new parts of speech with definitions and examples. You can either use the grammar cards for review and/or create an ELA Notebook to keep all Language Arts concepts together.

✏️ Read It! Read the daily sentence. You will focus on one new sentence in every lesson. There is also an emphasis on vocabulary. The vocabulary word is in bold. Here your student (s) will look up the meaning in a dictionary (if needed) and write it down. (Flashcards would be handy)

✏️Mark It! Mark or identify the parts of speech. With the updated version, now the student knows how many of each part they should find. For example; 2 articles (ar), 4 nouns (n) and 3 prepositional phrases (prep).

✏️Fix It! The focus is on the mechanics of writing (capitalization, punctuation, and spelling). Find and correct the errors within the sentence. There’s also a helpful guide to let the student know how many errors there are.

✏️Rewrite It! Potential Parent Involvement: After discussing the corrections and sentence, rewrite the final version of the sentence using the correction made in the Mark it! and Fix It! process.

Then you’re done for the week. By the end of lesson 30, you will have corrected and rewritten one entire fictional story.

What I Do Miss – 2 things

✏️ In the old version, of Fix-It Grammar, the student was asked to choose the single strongest verb, adjective, and -ly adverb at the end of the week. Here was the opportunity to re-read the four sentences, review their work as a whole, and discuss why they chose those particular words. (at least in my home) . In the updated version, it isn’t emphasized, in the lesson, to work on those skills.

✏️ I prefer the old Teacher Manual. It was full of advanced grammar notations and teacher’s notes. It really helped me understand the why’s in grammar. The newer edition is a lot more simplified. Thankfully, during my early “must.buy.all.the.things.homeschool” phase, I still have all 6 books of the older version – great for referencing.

How Will We Use it?

As of April 2022, we won’t be using these specific resources in this current homeschooling year because we are deep into our year and want us to finish our current workload before introducing anything new. However, I do plan to add this to our lineup , but haven’t figured out when, yet. So far, I know, I will have to start with Level 2 with my rising 4th grader based on my own observations while working with her on Book 3.