A recent posting from Joanna Rubba requested input on grammar teaching from "the K-12 crowd." At our private boys school we admit into 7th grade boys from many different school backgrounds. Since some have studied grammar and some have not, we have to start from scratch. I begin by pointing out that you need two things to make a sentence: something you're talking about and what you're saying about it. I point out how exciting it is that we have this power to join two ideas together–"fuse" them–in this way, and that there are an infinite number of ways of doing it. We start by finding this pattern in two-or-three-word sentences. As we expand sentences–always making them interesting and when possible choosing them from their own writing or from literature they are reading–they see how subject and predicate can acquire modifiers, whether single-word or prepositional phrases, and how, depending on the kind of verb (intransitive, transitive, linking), they can be filled out ("complemented") with direct and indirect objects and subject complements. Then come the verbals: gerunds, present participles and infinitives. By the end of the first trimester, the students are comfortable diagramming simple sentences, including sentences with prepositional and participial phrases of all kinds. Their eagerness to put diagrams on the board and the intelligent questions they ask about the logical relationships between parts of a sentence is exciting to see and belies the notion that grammar is dull. We use a British form of diagramming in which the major sentence units–subject, verb, direct object, indirect object, subject complement, adjective and adverb modifiers, are placed in boxes and joined with appropriate lines. This method is simpler, less sprawling than the line diagramming of Warriner's and most American textbooks. It allows the basic architecture of the sentence to stand out clearly. When students see how a word in the adjective box can suddenly acquire a direct object because it is a present participle, they say "Wow!" They are intrigued by the way the hybrid parts of speech (verbals) expand the possibilities of including information in a sentence without the need for any new grammar principles. Since the sentences in exercises in many grammar textbooks are often too contrived, uninteresting, or few, I collect my own from novels, stories, student writings. I sometimes have students imitate these sentences by creating their own sentences on the same pattern. This helps them "try on" styles of writing they might never have used on their own, expanding their repertoire. Seventh graders are capable of writing sentences rich in participial phrases, inversion, variety of length and structure, absolute constructions, etc., though I would not claim this as a direct result of grammar study except insofar as the latter raises consciousness of options. In the second trimester of 7th grade we move on to complex sentences. Since subordinate clauses are used as a single part of speech–adjective (relative clauses), noun (usually direct object), or adverb (8 kinds)–and since the pattern of verb-subject recognition has become automatic by this time, they easily spot clauses. All they need now is to learn the typical introductory words (conjunctions or pronouns) for each kind of clause. By the end of the trimester they can diagram any kind of sentence, including some quite challenging ones like these: • There are people who don't want to hear what you have to say unless it is what they have already said to you. • He said it was all up with him because if he did get saved, whoever saved him would send him back home to claim the reward. (Twain) • Prackle had several blond sisters of whom he was so proud that he had on occasion caused a commotion when he thought they had been insulted. (Steinbeck) Again we use a simplified form of diagramming, writing each clause in a rectangle followed by the Kind of clause (Adjective, Noun, Adverb, Main) in a second (adjoining) rectangle, and its relationship to the rest of the sentence (direct object, modifying a noun or verb, etc.) in a third. The students feel proud that they can understand how such sentences are put together since many college students cannot do that. Somewhere along the line we throw in compound sentences, which are easy since they are simply two or more simple sentences joined together, and we learn the different methods of joining. They like to show off their use of the semi-colon, which always provokes a discussion about how the parts on either side of the semi-colon are related to each other, and whether the semi-colon is or is not more effective than a period and two sentences. Some of the authors we read in 7th grade use a rich variety of sentence structures. We practice identifying simple, compound, complex, compound/complex sentences in books and stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Twain, London, S. E. Hinton, Lessing, and others. Students come to see the nobility of a finely constructed sentence that accomplishes several things at once. In high school the tools they have learned to use in 7th grade can be applied to ever more varied and developed texts as a way of appreciating style. I agree wholeheartedly with most of the contributors to this list that contextualizing grammar (seeing it in connection with thought and its expression) is the way to rescue it from the doldrums where it has languished so long. It is an insult to children's intelligence to assume they cannot be interested in how ideas are related and how the sentence mirrors or embodies this relationship. Thank you all for reading this. If I can further the cause in any way, please let me know! Bon courage. Fr. Laurence Kriegshauser, O.S.B. Saint Louis Priory School 500 South Mason Road St. Louis, MO 63141