ENGLISH COMPOSITION OVERVIEW
In this section we're obviously talking about written compositions: if you look at the page for Composition ages 7-9 you'll see that the emphasis at that age is not on original writing but on modelling and oral narration (similar to the pattern followed by Charlotte Mason).
There are three basic stages to writing compositions, one skill flowing from and building upon the preceding one. If a child has not mastered the first, he will stumble over the second; if he cannot master the second, he will struggle with the third. These three stages correspond roughly to the following ages/levels:
Mastering sentences: 6/7 -10/11
Mastering paragraphs: 10/11- 12/13
Mastering essays: 13+
Sentences
A common reaction to this schedule is to say 'How on earth can it take four years to learn how to write a sentence?' The answer to this is that mastering the basic properties of a sentence is not as easy as it looks (just take a glance at any newspaper or modern novel to find endless examples of constructions which are not actually grammatically correct sentences). For example, at the most basic level you might teach a child that a sentence has four characteristics:
It must start with a capital letter
It must end with a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark
It must contain a doing or being word (a verb)
It must express a complete thought/make sense.
This is enough when you are looking at simple sentences such as:
A bumblebee stung Peter.
Here you simply have a subject, a verb and an object together with the requisite punctuation.
However, by the age of ten you will be dealing with more complex sentences such as:
A bumblebee flew into Peter's open mouth, stinging the poor boy's tongue, which swelled up as big and as blue as an aubergine.
Here you have a main clause, a subordinate clause with a present participle, several descriptive adjectives and an adjectival phrase.
If your child does not know, for example, that a sentence needs to have at least one main clause which contains a subject and a verb, he might easily fall into the common error of writing something like this:
A bumblebee flew into Peter's mouth. Stinging the poor boy's tongue, which swelled up as big and as blue as an aubergine.
The first of these is a sentence but the second is obviously not since it lacks a main clause.
This is why the teaching of sentence construction is not finished when your seven year old successfully writes a grammatically correct simple sentence. Even at the level of sentence construction, your child will be needing to deal with the more complex grammatical niceties of main clauses, subordinate clauses and phrases (adjectival and adverbial) as well as more complex punctuation (such as colons and semi colons) if he is going to be able to construct grammatically correct compound and complex sentences and this is a lot easier to explain to a nine or ten year old than it is to a six or seven year old!
Paragraphs
Since a paragraph consists of several sentences on the same topic arranged in a logical order, sentence construction needs to be thoroughly mastered before a child can move on to writing paragraphs. In fact, if your child has got to the age of 12 or 13 and is writing paragraphs which frequently contain non-grammatical sentences, it is worth stopping and going back the basics of sentence construction until you identify what has not been learned.
To master paragraph construction, the main skill needed is to think logically, in order to organise one's thoughts and/or arguments coherently. This is true whether you are writing about your pet dog or about the economic situation in Europe. Material for paragraphing practice is limitless: you can use any subject, broken down into any number of topics. If your child is a reluctant writer (or just finds his textbook boring) substitute the given topics for others which suit him better. It's not the subject which matters, it's the skill of organising one's thoughts and expressing them coherently and correctly.
Most guides will tell you tell you that in outline, paragraph construction consists of
- an introductory or topic sentence which introduces the topic in an interesting and eye-catching way
- three or four supporting sentences which expand on the topic in a coherent and logical manner
- a concluding sentence which sums up the main points of the paragraph in a concise way.
It's not just a random collection of sentences about the same topic!
Essays
Once the paragraph is mastered, the essay should not seem at all as daunting as it often does, since an essay is essentially a series of paragraphs on one subject. However, the essay does clearly represent the next level of complexity in composition: just as the paragraph is not a random selection of sentences strung together, so the essay is not just a random selection of paragraphs strung together! Not only must the writer decide on what information to put into each paragraph (and decide how to structure each, following some pattern such as that outlines above), he must also smoothly connect multiple paragraphs together, and frame the whole with a suitable introductory paragraph and a conclusion.
Clearly, if a child is struggling to construct grammatically correct sentences and/or effective paragraphs, he is going to find writing a good essay almost impossible, since the internal structure of the essay depends almost entirely on the effectiveness of the paragraphs from which it is constructed. Likewise, the effectiveness of a paragraph depends on the effectiveness of the sentences from which it is itself, in turn, constructed.
I hope this explains why teaching sentence structure (and teaching composition generally in a methodical way) is not something you want to rush!
In this section we're obviously talking about written compositions: if you look at the page for Composition ages 7-9 you'll see that the emphasis at that age is not on original writing but on modelling and oral narration (similar to the pattern followed by Charlotte Mason).
There are three basic stages to writing compositions, one skill flowing from and building upon the preceding one. If a child has not mastered the first, he will stumble over the second; if he cannot master the second, he will struggle with the third. These three stages correspond roughly to the following ages/levels:
Mastering sentences: 6/7 -10/11
Mastering paragraphs: 10/11- 12/13
Mastering essays: 13+
Sentences
A common reaction to this schedule is to say 'How on earth can it take four years to learn how to write a sentence?' The answer to this is that mastering the basic properties of a sentence is not as easy as it looks (just take a glance at any newspaper or modern novel to find endless examples of constructions which are not actually grammatically correct sentences). For example, at the most basic level you might teach a child that a sentence has four characteristics:
It must start with a capital letter
It must end with a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark
It must contain a doing or being word (a verb)
It must express a complete thought/make sense.
This is enough when you are looking at simple sentences such as:
A bumblebee stung Peter.
Here you simply have a subject, a verb and an object together with the requisite punctuation.
However, by the age of ten you will be dealing with more complex sentences such as:
A bumblebee flew into Peter's open mouth, stinging the poor boy's tongue, which swelled up as big and as blue as an aubergine.
Here you have a main clause, a subordinate clause with a present participle, several descriptive adjectives and an adjectival phrase.
If your child does not know, for example, that a sentence needs to have at least one main clause which contains a subject and a verb, he might easily fall into the common error of writing something like this:
A bumblebee flew into Peter's mouth. Stinging the poor boy's tongue, which swelled up as big and as blue as an aubergine.
The first of these is a sentence but the second is obviously not since it lacks a main clause.
This is why the teaching of sentence construction is not finished when your seven year old successfully writes a grammatically correct simple sentence. Even at the level of sentence construction, your child will be needing to deal with the more complex grammatical niceties of main clauses, subordinate clauses and phrases (adjectival and adverbial) as well as more complex punctuation (such as colons and semi colons) if he is going to be able to construct grammatically correct compound and complex sentences and this is a lot easier to explain to a nine or ten year old than it is to a six or seven year old!
Paragraphs
Since a paragraph consists of several sentences on the same topic arranged in a logical order, sentence construction needs to be thoroughly mastered before a child can move on to writing paragraphs. In fact, if your child has got to the age of 12 or 13 and is writing paragraphs which frequently contain non-grammatical sentences, it is worth stopping and going back the basics of sentence construction until you identify what has not been learned.
To master paragraph construction, the main skill needed is to think logically, in order to organise one's thoughts and/or arguments coherently. This is true whether you are writing about your pet dog or about the economic situation in Europe. Material for paragraphing practice is limitless: you can use any subject, broken down into any number of topics. If your child is a reluctant writer (or just finds his textbook boring) substitute the given topics for others which suit him better. It's not the subject which matters, it's the skill of organising one's thoughts and expressing them coherently and correctly.
Most guides will tell you tell you that in outline, paragraph construction consists of
- an introductory or topic sentence which introduces the topic in an interesting and eye-catching way
- three or four supporting sentences which expand on the topic in a coherent and logical manner
- a concluding sentence which sums up the main points of the paragraph in a concise way.
It's not just a random collection of sentences about the same topic!
Essays
Once the paragraph is mastered, the essay should not seem at all as daunting as it often does, since an essay is essentially a series of paragraphs on one subject. However, the essay does clearly represent the next level of complexity in composition: just as the paragraph is not a random selection of sentences strung together, so the essay is not just a random selection of paragraphs strung together! Not only must the writer decide on what information to put into each paragraph (and decide how to structure each, following some pattern such as that outlines above), he must also smoothly connect multiple paragraphs together, and frame the whole with a suitable introductory paragraph and a conclusion.
Clearly, if a child is struggling to construct grammatically correct sentences and/or effective paragraphs, he is going to find writing a good essay almost impossible, since the internal structure of the essay depends almost entirely on the effectiveness of the paragraphs from which it is constructed. Likewise, the effectiveness of a paragraph depends on the effectiveness of the sentences from which it is itself, in turn, constructed.
I hope this explains why teaching sentence structure (and teaching composition generally in a methodical way) is not something you want to rush!