Homeschool & new stuff e.g. fronted adverbials

[Andrea87]

I wonder how many adults are learning new things that children have to know nowadays by helping them with school work at the moment ?
Do you think what good does it do that an 8 year old knows about fronted adverbials and can spot them from a mile away? How useful is this going to be in later life?
What is the most useless / confusing thing your children is learning?
You might be enjoying finding out new Ideas and your school may be brilliant at explaining new concepts to parents and carers or you might be having to find out how to teach this yourself. There seems to be a huge disparity with school support.
So am I being unreasonable that I think there are more important concepts than for example a fronted adverbial for an 8 year old to know? Or you might even love them and think I am talking rubbish here.

Don't forget that a lot of what schools teach isn't the choice of individual schools let alone teachers. We have to teach fronted adverbial because they're in the National Curriculum.

That one's not quite as pointless as it seems. If children can recognise fronted adverbial then they can use them in their own writing. It's one technique to vary their sentence structure and make their writing less repetitive and more interesting rather than starting every sentence with "the", "it" or a character's name.

Fronted adverbials are important. The earlier children learn grammar and what it all means/is used for, the better they will write in later life. You only have to read a few threads on here to see how many people have no concept of spelling, grammar, punctuation...

They will learn it in an almost mechanical way at 8, but it'll stay ingrained in them. Obviously this works different for someone with dyslexia, for example.

Knowing how grammar works will be extremely useful later on when they need to write essays at school, job applications, emails to their senior manager. Not to mention it's extremely hard to learn a foreign language if you don't have a basic understanding of grammar in your own language. How would they understand what a perfect or past tense is and how to translate these, or how and where prepositions and adverbials are used?

*differently. Adverb my phone decided to turn into an adjective

Unfortunately, I can’t work out if your complaint is about the quality of work set by school (in which case, YANBU; let school know you need more guidance) or fronted adverbials (YABU). Recently, fronted adverbials have become part of the curriculum, not the school’s choice. Brilliantly, they will make your son’s writing more interesting*

• unless he uses them in every sentence, like I have, because that’s tedious.

You’ve probably used them all your life, and you’ve certainly read them, without knowing what they’re called. There are probably secondary teachers complaint about some children starting every sentence with one!

I have genuinely found learning more about grammar interesting. I often have to write reports, online help etc and I wish I had been taught more of this when I was a child, it would have really helped.

My parents discovered new labels when I was at school. There's nothing new.

It seems to me that a lot of the current modern concepts over-complicate everything and makes it HARDER for everybody, child included. For that reason, they seem like a complete waste of time.

Grammar? Of course it's important. It's obviously not taught anywhere near enough. I hate homeschooling, but I can't see how grammar shouldn't be at the top of the list.

If the above were true then children wouldn’t present at high school with such low levels of literacy/poor grammar standards. They can feature spot a fronted adverbial. This is not a useful skill.

I don’t think either of the other points are correct either. Learning grammar by rote is not necessarily helpful to language learning which is why being immersed in any language is the best way to attain fluency. We learn grammar as we acquire language and this is unrelated to our understanding of grammar. Later on the knowledge of some grammar rules maybe helpful to develop a deeper understanding but most adults, including those who write and speak accurately, couldn’t tell you how many tenses we have in English, what a modal verb is or where the predicate is with a sentence.

I rather like Michale Rosen on the subject
michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/fronted-adverbial-fronted-adjectival.html?m=1

My 8yo literacy-hating son was doing these last week. It has challenged him to write more textured sentences — which sounds wanky but is actually true. I was deeply sceptical but it is true.

It helps him develop his writing when he has no natural inclination to do so, so I’m good with it.

The funny thing for me is that I am a journalist. When I use fronted adverbials, adverbs generally, and mountains of adjectives (as my daughter is learning to use!), the editor rips them all out! So my writing is much plainer than theirs.

So how would you teach children to expand on their vocabulary and write sentences in different ways?

It'[s really not that hard to understand that adverbs add detail or that you can start sentences with a different word each time. Children don't mind being taught this.

I wasn’t really taught grammar at school, the only grammar I know is from my french lessons. My DD was shocked that I didn’t know what a fronted adverbial was. I still have to ask myself “is that a doing word or a describing word” if I’m trying to work out whether a word is a verb or an adjective...
I’m also getting very confused by the maths methods, and I did further maths A level!

I have a degree in English Lit and languages, and I used to work as a copy-editor. I was never taught the term adverbial, fronted or otherwise. As was the norm in NZ schools at the time I learned basic parts of speech (nouns, verbs etc) at primary school, and then properly learned grammar when studying German and Spanish at high school and beyond.

I do agree it's important to learn grammar. It helps you to communicate properly and makes your writing more interesting. I'm less certain about the use of introducing so much jargon and think there must be a better way to do it.

Children have an infinite capacity for learning, if we make it interesting enough.

Learning grammar by rote is not necessarily helpful to language learning which is why being immersed in any language is the best way to attain fluency.

When you're 6, you can learn a new language within months by immersion, without knowing any grammar.

It's not that simple when you're an adult. I moved to where I live now, less than a year ago. I'm fully immersed here but still far from attaining fluency. When my teacher explains about the perfect tense of a modal verb in a passive sentence, I'm bloody grateful I did grammar at school. Knowing how to construct my sentences and how the exceptions apply makes me understand more of what they speak on the street or at work. If I tried to learn simply by immersion, it would take years. I have colleagues who have been here 5-6 years and still can't say more than the basics because they never learnt the language formally. They can work in English, copy the odd native language text on google translate and they get by. For contrast, I should be fluent by the summer. Grammar is key to learning a new language when you're older.

Sure Eileen most adults are poor at learning languages, especially if they are already only fluent in one. I use grammar to explicitly teach to adults all the time. Many of us gain our true understanding of grammar whilst trying to wrestle with a second language. I was focusing on primary pupils learning English though. The best education of children inspires and motivates. It is satisfying to see that you can craft the language in a story but I can teach that without too much terminology and do because the part where the children learned those terms has already killed their joy of language, stories and writing. I teach grammar all the time but do not think that the govt has don’t anything to improve the teaching of English in their feature spotting approach.

Pupils who would have once loved to read and write arrive at high school hating English. This is amplified all through high school so we have fewer studying lit and Lang at A-Level.

In all honesty, the reason kids are taught the phrase "fronted adverbials" is just so they can pass the Y6 SATs. People naturally use all sorts of grammar in their everyday writing without necessarily knowing the proper name for the various grammar components.

If your child is having trouble remembering the tedious phrase, I would focus on the "front" and "ad" parts - it goes in front of the sentence and ad[d]s to the meaning.

Examples of fronted adverbials are any words/phrases at the start of a sentence that describes what happens next. " Eventually, we understood fronted adverbials." " When we are older, we stop talking about fronted adverbials." " Happily, we found out on Mumsnet that everyone thinks fronted adverbials suck."

Thank you for all your comments and the link to Michael Rosen - I had recently read this. Great author.
I agree grammar is important to teach, when I have taught Mfl in the past it certainly helped when children know about different parts of sentences, however grammatical jargon shouldn’t stifle creativity and put children off writing.
And to all you teachers/TAs who are going into schools and doing a great job , thank you (Btw I know I shouldn’t start a sentence with and).

Thing is, if children know what these grammatical terms are, it’s easier to teach them to improve their writing. I remember telling a child (pre SPag being taught like this) that she needed to extend her sentences. She did this by not putting full stops in. When I said ‘you’re missing some full stops’ (in confusion as she was a good writer and in y4) she looked at me in confusion and said ‘yes, because you told me my sentences should be longer’. Had I said ‘can you start your sentences with a fronted adverbial’ or ‘all your sentences are simple, can you use some conjunctions and make some of them compound or complex’, she might have extended her sentences and actually improved her writing rather than just omitting full stops!!

I think grammar does have its place, though it’s dull to teach.

Having no clue what an FA was, I enjoyed this piece that a primary school teacher shared.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/iknowineedtostoptalking.com/2018/04/14/biff-chip-and-kipper-and-the-fronted-adverbials/amp/

From Michael Rosen: 'Many people who have studied languages, who’ve done English degrees, who do jobs involving editing have remarked that they are unfamiliar with this term and that they’ve been able to get along fine without knowing. That is, they know plenty of other terms that they have found useful, but this one doesn’t seem particularly so.'

I love grammar but think he is correct...everyone should know what an adverb is but 'fronted adverbial' is just new-fangled jargon.

I’v been learning all about number bonds and number lines and it’s a pain in the arse frankly!

@MsJaneAusten

Unfortunately, I can’t work out if your complaint is about the quality of work set by school (in which case, YANBU; let school know you need more guidance) or fronted adverbials (YABU). Recently, fronted adverbials have become part of the curriculum, not the school’s choice. Brilliantly, they will make your son’s writing more interesting*

• unless he uses them in every sentence, like I have, because that’s tedious.

I've no idea what a fronted adverbial is. And I have O-levels in French, German and Latin, and an A for Latin and English at A -level.

Perhaps they hadn't bee invented when I was at school. It was the 60s, lots of things hadn't been invented back then.

The Conservatives are really into grammar terminology for some reason

I didn’t learn any grammar terms at school and still managed to get a degree etc, but could probably have done with a little more explicit grammar teaching.

However the Tories do seem to have sacrificed creativity in favour of lifeless grammar analysis.

WTAF is a 'fronted' adverbial? It's like 'synthetic' phonics, load of hairy old bollocks.

however grammatical jargon shouldn’t stifle creativity and put children off writing.

Absolutely. It's a key element but it should not be seen as tedious or boring by kids, or put them off writing.

To the PP suggesting I'm poor at languages, maybe struggling with language no. 6 is nowadays perceived as being poor at learning them 😅