6th Grade Grammar

Sixth grade grammar is tricky if you're not careful. Roots, prefixes, and suffixes join forces with pronouns to pepper sixth grader prose, which has no choice but to become more interesting and complex as the burgeoning young person starts reading more complicated material and having ideas of his own.

Drawing Lines in the Sand

Some teachers like to tell their students that sentence diagramming is an important step in their understanding of grammar. It remains unclear if anything in the history of the world has turned more people off from the beauty of grammar and language arts, but some teachers continue to tell young people that it is a fun and crucial component to English acquisition. Everything that sounds like “art” or has “art” in the name is in danger of grinding to a halt under the watch of educators who insist on telling students lies about what's fun and what's not.

Why do they tell these lies? It is more than likely an accidental untruth than a deliberate prevarication, born in the same brothel as famous illegitimates such as “making children do a million math problems helps them learn the concept of addition” or “you have to know Elizabethan history and slang to understand Shakespeare” or “sudoku is fun and huge in Japan.” The people who like sudoku are the same ones who would like sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming is about as useful as sudoku.

If your sixth grader is being made to diagram sentences, you should either write a letter to you congress person, board of education, and teacher or go to Wikipedia's page on the subject or spend time in the YD forums where some people know all about it. There's not really much else to be done. Perhaps your sixth grader will find solace in an assurance that she will never be asked to diagram a sentence for the rest of her life unless she decides to become a linguist, and then only as a parlor trick.

The Roots of Sixth Grade Grammar

English has a ton of Latin and Greek. Something about its inauspicious beginnings keeps English operating a major inferiority complex. English often prefers inventing words from roots of other languages over using perfectly good Saxon words. “Submarine craft” should be “underwater boat,” but it isn't, so it comes in handy to know some root words. You can make your own words up if you invent something like the telephone, and if you don't invent it, you can at least know what it is.

Roots are the most important things students will learn in the sixth grade. In fact, knowing roots will facilitate not only the command of English but also the acquisition of other languages. Plus, what is cooler than a sixth grade grammarian knowing the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic or that “holographic manuscript” is redundant? Sixth graders will relish the fact that they understand robotics a little more with words like “biomimicry” and “exoskeleton,” and will finally know why micodermabrasion is important to a healthy epidermis.

Flash cards work wonderfully when it comes to rote learning, and rote learning might just be the ticket to the carnival when it comes to suffixes, prefixes, and roots. Mr. Hobbs thinks so! Mr. Hobbs has put together this lovely flashcard set that will surely rival the root word repertoires of even saltier folks who haven't had the pleasure of thinking about sixth grade grammar in 20 years.

Pronouns

Pronouns are just like regular nouns except they're a bit more professional about it. They can take or leave determiners. Pronouns don't need any help. They're the ones you call when no other noun will do. They are, in brief, very special nouns. I, you, he, she, and it, and all of those words' modified forms, including plural and possessive forms, are pronouns. They're actually quite easy at least ostensibly, but most languages like to differentiate object and subject pronouns. That gets tricky for some people.

An object receives the verb and appears after the verb in an active sentence.

In a sentence like “Jennifer has a robot,” robot is the object. With the exception of “it” and “you” all other pronouns change when they are objects of sentences.

Examples

  • It serves her. “Jennifer” has become “her” (object pronoun) and “robot” has become “it” (subject pronoun).
  • She teaches it hygiene. “Jennifer” has become “she” (subject pronoun), and “it” remains the same as an object pronoun.
  • With whom are you speaking, Jennifer? “Whom” is the interrogative object pronoun.
  • I'm teaching my robot about microdermabrasion. “I” is the first person subject pronoun, and “my” is the first person possessive pronoun.
  • Who gave you a robot? “Who” is the interrogative subject pronoun, “you” is the second person object pronoun.
  • Daddy... he gave it to me. “He” is a masculine subject pronoun, and “me” is the first person object pronoun.

If your sixth grader knows when to use “me” and when to use “I,” he or she is already has a better command of the English language than about 92% of all English speakers.

Make It Fun. . . PLEASE!

The sixth grade is filled with difficult things to remember. It's easy to get caught up in minutia and drill-and-kill learning, but remember that your young grammarian is not a robot. If you can get a sixth grader to learn a few of the aforementioned points without abominating the language, you've done at least a million times better than Teddy Ruxpin ever could.