I was provided this resource for free and paid a wee bit to write this post, but just like with all things from The WOLFe Pack, what you will find here is an honest opinion from a seasoned homeschool mom with a Master’s Degree in Education and a decade of experience in the classroom…who also happens to be a mom with way too little exercise, a broken dishwasher and only 9 months left on her homeschool clock.
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HOW DID I LET THIS HAPPEN?
Big confession coming. Ready?
My son BOMBED the English portion of the ACT.
Seriously. The ENGLISH portion. He BOMBED it.
We had him take the ACT “cold” in the spring (more on that strategy in a future post) and when we got his scores, we were shocked at two things.
1. How high he scored on the Science portion.
2. How low he scored on the English portion.
His Math and Reading scores were right where we expected them to be considering the “cold” attempt. But, Science and English were pretty unusual.
And, for a homeschool mom who has homeschooled her kid since Day One, and who also happens to be pretty naturally grammar-minded, I was shocked. Somehow, I had managed to fail my one and only kid in teaching him the mechanics of the only language he knows.
Now, before you try to make me feel better by reminding me that this was a “cold” attempt, let me also add that he took a practice test last week at home.
And he bombed the English portion again.
So, yeah.
The kid has some grammar gaps.
And, somehow I had no clue!
It’s not like he talks funny or anything.
And he is actually a decent writer.
And, for Pete’s sake, he was reading at age 4.
So, how did this happen?
Maybe, I was so focused on making sure his math and science skills were above and beyond, that I neglected his grammar needs.
But, wondering how I allowed this to happen is a waste of time.
After all, he’s the only one I have. No need to improve my homeschooling skills at this point. 🙂
The important thing is to fill those grammar gaps so colleges don’t toss his application in the trash.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
We need to fill those grammar gaps.
So, we made a plan. It is a simple four-step plan.
STEP ONE: Take and score an ACT Practice Test. We did that last week.
STEP TWO: Identify all specific grammar gaps. We did this by analyzing which type of questions he missed on the ACT Practice Test.
STEP THREE: Fill those gaps! We’re doing this with a self-paced American English Grammar course through Mr. D.
STEP FOUR: Repeat steps One through Three. Do this until it appears on paper that my son is not an immigrant from a far-away foreign land who just wandered into the ACT Test on some random Saturday morning and sat down within 10 minutes of stepping foot on American soil for the first time.
Note: If your student is worried about taking the test, I would suggest you spend some time overcoming test anxiety before you start with Step One.
Let me break down each step in case you want to replicate it with your own student.
STEP ONE: Take and score an ACT Practice Test.
- Purchase an ACT practice/prep book. We chose the Official ACT Prep Guide which you can easily purchase on Amazon.
- Take one of the practice tests. When doing this, do it for real. Like use the correct timing. Do it in the correct order. Use the silly #2 pencils. Replicate the real test environment as much as you can.
- Then score the practice test. We did this together just to make it faster and more accurate. He read the answers he had selected from his answer sheet and I marked them down on the scoring key. Then he circled the incorrect answers. This gave us the score for this section, but more importantly, it showed us the areas he needed to work on…his grammar gaps.
STEP TWO: Identify all specific grammar gaps.
- My son went through the “Explanatory Answers” section of Official ACT Prep Guide and marked each question he missed.
- Then he highlighted any information in each explanation that clued him into what the question was really addressing (subject-verb agreement, commas, etc.)
- And, finally he made himself a spreadsheet of the problem areas.
- You can see a snippet of it below. I’ll admit that it makes very little sense to me, BUT it makes perfect sense to him and that’s what matters. I would caution you not to do this step yourself. The eye-opening value of my son reading every explanation, finding the common threads across those incorrect answers and then putting that into a purposeful document, was worth a lot more than I can explain.
STEP THREE: Fill those gaps!
- I cautioned you above not to do Step Two yourself; now I want to caution you to make sure to involve yourself with Step Three. Finding ways to fill those gaps will take time, but you want to make sure your student is filling each gap with solid information. Right? Unless you took an unorthodox approach to choosing your homeschool curricula, you likely spent a lot of time and money making sure that whatever you used to educate your homeschool student was solid. So, we want to take the same approach here. But, that does not mean it needs to be a long, drawn-out semester length study on The Science Behind English Grammar. 🙂 You literally want to find something simple and effective to teach that skill/fill that gap and move on.
- Fortunately, I had been offered to write a post for Mr. D’s American English Grammar course and when I had been perusing the course, I noticed that it very clearly said, “Lessons and sections can be completed in any order.” PERFECT!
- So, we went through the course listing of lessons (which was very easy to do quickly because everything is so neatly organized and clearly labeled….you can see small snippet of it on the image below) and made note of which lessons would address which problem area (aka: which lesson would fill which gap.)
- Then my son added each lesson to the appropriate place on his spreadsheet.
- He also figured out how many lessons he needed to do in total so he could find the best way to get them done in the quickest order as possible.
- Anything we could not find an obvious title for, I made note of so I was sure to find something to teach/reteach the problem area.
- And then he got to work.
- He watched the video lesson from the instructor on Mr. D’s site.
- If he felt he needed more practice on the topic, he did the accompanying assignment.
- If the video lesson did the trick, he moved on.
- If he needed more clarification, he asked me.
- He will finish working through each problem area this week…just in time to take another practice test. 🙂
If you’re familiar with Mr. D., you might be thinking, “I thought he teaches math.” And you’d be correct. Mr. D. does teach math, but he also has a team of teachers on his site who teach other subjects…loads of them in fact. And one of those classes is the self-paced American English Grammar course! He also has ASL, Study Skills, Music/Dance, Technology, Economics & more. You can check out his class listings here.
And, for a Sneak Peek into the American English Grammar class my son is taking, check out the video below.
STEP FOUR: Repeat Steps 1-3 as many times as possible!
- This step is “simple” with little explanation needed. My son will work through the process as many times as possible before retaking the actual ACT. 🙂
- Hopefully, we should see improvement with each attempt and we’re hoping for a nice improvement with the actual test next month!
So there you have it. Our simple, but (hopefully) effective plan to fill my son’s unexpected grammar gaps! As mentioned in the beginning, there’s little sense in rehashing what I did wrong that created these gaps to begin with, BUT, I will say that I wish I had signed him for a class like American English Grammar long before now. It’s self-paced, cleanly organized and full of necessary content. Chances are, if he had done it before now, there would be no grammar gaps to fill.
UPDATE 09/03/23: My son completed his second ACT Practice Test yesterday and his English score went up FOUR POINTS! FOUR! And, that was after only studying some of the problem areas we identified in Step Two. So, YAY! He went up and I’m confident that with more focused learning to fill those pesky grammar gaps, he can go up even more.
