My homeschooled 12 year old son is in a one hour a week 7th-9th grade writing composition class this year. His only grammar training before this class came from occasionally doing some free online grammar exercises and games. I think he picked up a lot of grammar rules just by reading a lot, the same way he picked up spelling without really working on that except for practicing for the state spelling bee one year.
In her one hour with her students, the teacher assigns a warm-up writing exercise that has to be at least a paragraph, and then before my son can finish writing that, she goes over two or three pages of grammar rules and examples that she writes on the board and are to be copied by the students. She gives them at least seven sheets of grammar exercises and a creative writing assignment (must be at least one page) that are due the next week. The writing assignment includes circling all simple subjects and predicates or whatever the main grammar lesson for the day was. She is supposed to be preparing the kids for college level writing. My son is not the only smart kid in the class and I think this is so good for him, but...his grammar is one of the things that already made him seem different, in addition to his use of a higher level vocabulary than most of the adults where we live. I think ending a sentence with a preposition is okay sometimes, for example "What room are you in?" or "What are you looking for?" Is it really better to be grammatically correct in every day conversation?
