“Applied Grammar Intermediate Level: Improve Your Writing!” is a great way to improve your student’s grammar skills. This soft cover, workbook style book contains 40 individual lessons that walk you through a systematic process of modeling and patterning the structure of language. Although the lesson instructions are contained in the book, your student will need to write their lesson work in a notebook, which didn’t bother my student any since that is her preferred method! (My girls hate writing in books!) The target grade level for this particular book is 6th through 10th, but you can adapt it to whatever age level you need to. As you look through the table of contents, you will see that as your student works through each lesson, they will cover each part of speech in the order that they are naturally acquired. This will help them learn easier, and retain the knowledge better. Additionally included are: example sentence types, writing prompts, assignment answers, a list of activities, and a complete glossary of grammar terms. It is priced well at $25.00, and is well worth the investment.

The process put into practice within Applied Grammar Intermediate Level: Improve Your Writing is unique. Gail Brubaker saw a need when it came to teaching children English and created this mulit-sensory method. She focused on higher level thinking skills of categorizing, analyzing, and pattern recognition. Each part of speech is color coded and that allows for speedy recognition and classification of parts of speech, which then lends itself to retaining in long term memory. I used this with my daughter in the eighth grade. When I began schooling her at home, it was because she had a struggle with reading comprehension, and I was interested in this method for that very reason. If you are diligent to use the method the way it is laid out for you, it helps your student comprehend what they read much more easily. I saw that instead of her having rely solely on memorization of rules, she was able to rely on the process and put it to work for her. The exciting thing was that she went from hating to write, to utilizing the writing prompts eagerly without hesitation. This method is easy to use for either homeschool use with one student or several at varied levels, but also easily adapted to a classroom.

This product is great! I love the process used and found it very helpful for my daughter. Personally, I would have liked to have a workbook for her to use, but she didn’t miss it. Like I said, she doesn’t like writing in books. She finds it fun to keep her lessons in a notebook, but I find that causes me to be organize challenged. Workbook pages are harder to lose!

I highly recommend this product for anyone looking for a new and inventive way to apply grammar in a way that dramatically improves your student’s writing skills. You will notice a difference in the quality of their writing, and if you’re lucky like me, their attitude as well.

-Product review by Barbette Yingst, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April, 2016