Sydney Hoff is a graduate of Emory University. She scored 780/800 on the writing section of the SATs and has years of experience tutoring university-level students to foster their writing abilities. Sydney performs copywriting and copyediting work for various organizations. She currently runs a business based in New York offering writing services for students from elementary through higher education.
An 8-week introductory grammar course in which students grades 3-5 learn grammar principles and practice their application to writing and editing.
Course Overview
Grammar is the system of language, the study of how sentences are constructed, and ultimately, the science which studies a thought process. Understanding grammar affords students precision of thought, a lifelong gift. In this course, students will learn foundational grammar concepts including parts of speech, punctuation marks, homophones, capitalization, and indentation.
Course Curriculum and Methodology
Because grammar is learned best when rooted in the writing experience, students will read passages with grammar mistakes, identify and correct the errors, and then re-write the passages correctly. The students will also learn diagramming, a method of sentence analysis that brings the relationship among the words of a sentence to the perceptual level so that students both see and understand the function of various parts of a sentence.
Students will learn to identify parts of speech, use proper and purposeful punctuation marks, distinguish between and choose correct homophones, and employ proper capitalization and indentation techniques.
Course Materials
This course uses the workbook, “Fix-It! Grammar: The Nose Tree,” which is the first book in a grammar series created by the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Each student must purchase a copy, sold here for $15.
Course Dates
This is an 8-week course beginning the week of July 6, 2020.
At the conclusion of this course, if there is interest, there will be another grammar course offered using the next workbook in the IEW series.
Registration Information
This course is taught by Sydney through Brighter Bee Academy, an after-school program located in Jersey City. You may register on Brighter Bee’s website, here.
People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.
In 2013, Ms. Lauren Bridgeford graduated with a BA in Languages, Literature, and Criticism from Hunter College. She has also obtained her DELTA (Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification from Cambridge University. Currently, Ms. Bridgeford is a Registered Instructor accredited by the Institute for Excellence in Writing, and she is pursuing her master’s degree in Secondary Education.
Deanna Heikkinen has been privately teaching writing as well as history, literature, and art history to students grades 2-12 for over six years. Prior to that, she was a tenured professor of humanities at Los Angeles Valley College with a focus on teaching the Great Books of Western Civilization. Additionally, she taught world history, western civilization, Native American history, and anthropology at the college level. Whether teaching elementary, middle, or high schoolers for Rose Writing Center, Deanna's diverse background allows her to serve as our test prep, academic support, and custom lesson specialist.
