Grammar speaks

 "I have four parts: letters, literature, the man of letters, and literary style. Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form. I claim to speak also about the nature and practice of poetry. Nature is that from which speech is formed. Practice occurs when we put that material into use. To these we add the matter, so as to know what we must talk about. Speech itself is taught in three steps; that is, from letters [i.e. phonemes, the basic units of sound in a particular language], syllables, and words."
~Grammar, explaining her profession and field of study in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by Martianus Capella (fl. A.D. 410-420)

Learning together

We've gotten far enough along in our studies of Kittredge and Arnold's Our Mother Tongue that we've begun diagramming sentences.  This isn't actually taught in the book, so I'm using The Complete Book of Diagrams by Mary Daly, and I never learned how to diagram in school, so last week I had to ask my Facebook friends how to diagram two that I didn't know what to do with.  That was a fun conversation -- thank God for Facebook!



We're in Chapter IX now which focuses on complete and simple subjects and predicates, so for now, when I write a sentence on the white board, all I require the kids to do is to find the verb and circle it, then find and circle the simple subject, then draw a line to separate the subject from the predicate.  My 15yod is loving diagramming though, so after her younger siblings mark their sentences she likes to diagram them.

Grammar stuff
"Asterism" is a bonus word from the chapter of Life of Fred we read later.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

We had another fun counting circle.  These kids.  I tell them the counting circle is only supposed to take five or ten minutes but they're getting such a kick out of coming up with complicated ways of saying the next number that it's dragging out to quite a bit longer.  My 14yos isn't as fond of making up problems as his sisters are, so sometimes while he's waiting for one of them to figure out what to say next I'll ask him to go ahead and give me all the rest of his numbers at once.  In this case it means he was counting by 15s instead of 5s, and he enjoyed that extra bit of challenge.  And then he decided he wanted to turn his into problems too, so he thought about each one while his sisters were taking their turns.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Quiet afternoon studies.  All of us sitting together is working out really well.