Institute for Excellence in Writing ~ REVIEW

For someone who loves to write you would think my grammar skills would be off the charts.  Well they are, just not in the right direction. :)  I've always struggled in this department and somehow all of my children have turned out successful and just fine.  But, with Kaden I've had the opportunity to try out the Fix It! Grammar program from Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW).  I was thrilled because I love their method of using stories to teach proper grammar.  I knew this would be a good choice for Kaden because of his inability to focus for long lessons of info feeding.  For just 15-20 minutes a day you are guided along through a predictable pattern of lessons each week.  Consistency is key to learning when you have a child with special needs.  Let me tell you how we used it.

Scope and Sequence

There are 6 levels and we started with the 1st one, The Nose Tree (Book 1).  You can compare all of the levels with this handy chart.  They do have a placement available online to take before you order.  Each week Kaden grew more and more confident working mostly independently through the workbook.  What's super cool is that each day you are given a new sentence from the story to proofread and correct.  Basically after all the lessons you will have a finished story copied sentence by sentence in your notebook.  I think that's a huge motivation to get your child to do their work.

Each week you have topics like apostrophes with contractions,action verbs, pronouns, articles and so forth.  We decided to do 3 days a week.  Mondays he would read the learn it section and complete the corrections of the first sentence.  Then we would go over it and correct anything he missed.  Wednesdays he would look up all the bold words listed in the week's sentences and correct day two's sentence.  Fridays he always reread the learn it section and would correct the last two days of sentences.  Each day he would write out the corrected sentence in his notebook and would even keep a running list of any vocabulary words.

It was super easy, never once did he get overwhelmed and I never had to ask twice for him to do his work.  The workbooks are basic, black and white, no over stimulation and the instructions are simple.  I want to add too that the Teachers Manual is also very easy to navigate.  It shows exactly what the student sees in their own workbook and offers the answers, fixes and grammar notations.  These were all super amazing for me to have as he worked through the lessons.  I also want to mention there is a glossary at the back of both the student's and teacher's book.

So, what did we think?  We loved it and plan to continue using it this year and also use the following 5 levels.  I believe having the lessons so short helped him not feel overwhelmed.  This allowed him  mentally to be somewhat of a sponge as far as learning these new concepts.  We have not in the past spent a lot of time on grammar.  I watched his confidence increase with each lesson and he came to me less and less for help.  This would be excellent for grammar in any homeschool and I would even say it would be perfect to do for reinforcement learning for public school kiddos.  This could easily be done in the summer time.  

Make sure you connect with Institute for Excellence in Writing on social media today.  And click below to read what other Crew Reviewers thought about this product and others from IEW.

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