Here's a hip book on grammar for middle school and high school students. Complete with a skit featuring "Grammar Girl and Genius Boy fighting evil 'Anti-Grammarians' who seek to destroy proper grammar as we know it," the book also comes with plenty of color and cartoons.

After a 20-question diagnostic pretest, the book is divided into seven parts. Part 1 covers capital letters, subjects and verbs, and adjectives and adverbs (with a nice graphic illustrating which types of words each modifies). Part 2 talks about sentences/fragments, run-on sentences/comma splices, and coordinating conjunctions (including a great mnemonic for remembering them). Part 3 teaches how to punctuate transitional and introductory expressions, more comma rules, and parallel structure. Part 4 discusses quotation marks, tense shifts, indirect quotes, agreement in person and number, and a review. Part 5 covers the use of pronouns. Part 6 includes misspellings of common homonyms and more about style. Part 7 talks about question marks, exclamation points, apostrophes, more about commas, and a review.

Each part contains chapters in a skit which takes place in Grammar City. Interspersed between each chapter are grammar units with text and exercises. The cleverly written skit has some name-calling, zombies, and magic powers, and it also assumes that students think grammar is boring. The main gist of the book, which comes though loud and clear, is that grammar is important and everyone needs to learn it.

The short introduction gives no indication, but I'm assuming you work through one of the 30 units per week. If my assumption is correct, this is not very much material to be covering in a year. I think parents will want to supplement this textbook with additional writing and grammar exercises to ensure proficiency in the subject.

The grammar lessons are very clearly explained without being verbose. In addition to the written exercises, there is a Grammar Journal assignment at the end of each unit, where students are directed to do some creative writing and edit their work according to the current lesson. For example, one assignment tells the student to write a compare/contrast paragraph, circle all the pronouns, and make sure they are clear and correct.

If you have tried standard English curriculums without success, have a spotty background in grammar, or have a student who hates grammar The Adventures of Genius Boy and Grammar Girl may be just the book for your homeschool.

Product review by Kathy Gelzer, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, September 2010