Daily Grammar Practice Academy Video Series from DGP Publishing, Inc. covers 1^st -12^th grade in the Original Series. Advanced Levels for grades 6^th-12^th grade are also available. There is also a College Level program as well.

I am using the Daily Grammar Practice Grade 9 Original. I received the Teacher Guide, Student Workbook, and DGP Academy Instructional Videos. You will need a Student Workbook for each student as the books are consumable and intended to be used with one student. Some pages in the Teacher Guide you have permission to reproduce and they are marked clearly at the bottom of the page.

Daily Grammar Practice is set up for thirty weeks of lessons five days a week. It is suggested that you have your student take a pretest before they begin the course and at the end of the course.

Each week you work on the same sentence. Your student will need to use the guided “Help Pages” to work on the sentence. This is found in your Teacher Guide. These pages are set up for daily lessons Monday through Friday. The Help Pages will be used to guide your student through daily grammatical concepts. For example, on Mondays, you will always search parts of speech. Tuesdays are parts and phrases. Wednesday you work through clauses and sentence types. Thursday covers punctuation and capitalizations. On Friday you will be diagramming the sentence. The Help Pages has the rules, definition, and the abbreviation for you to mark your sentences correctly. Examples of usage are provided for most of the concepts. It is easy to navigate the daily concepts that are laid out in a bullet format. You can follow up each day’s lesson by having your student watch the DGP Academy Instructional Videos. The videos can be used as a teacher only resource to help you teach the concept to your student. It is recommended that students correct their errors themselves. I thought the videos are a wonderful way to have my son check and correct his daily lessons. The daily lessons are short once you have mastered how to use the program. The concept is that you are taking a sentence and digging into it while you are dissecting it word by word. In this way, you are breaking it up into small pieces so you can fully grasp the details of it. The sentences that they work on are intentional and not random sentences. The sentences are simple at first and will gradually become more difficult. I liken this to a mastery concept for grammar the way the lessons are set up. It could easily be implemented in a classroom or homeschool setting.

Another page your student will be using is the Marking Guide all the concepts are broken down by day of the week. When you look at your Marking Guide for Monday you have all the parts of speech abbreviations needed to mark your sentence correctly.

Teacher Guide is a spiral-bound book. The Teacher Guide includes instructions on the Daily Grammar Practice method. This is a unique method of teaching grammar and I highly recommend you take time to look over the book first before you implement it. The author Dawn Burnette explains why she uses her format of teaching grammar and explains how it works.

I would read the Getting Started as it breaks down what you will need a copy of in your Teachers Guide for your student. You will be copying your Marking Guide that shows all the grammar abbreviations, proofreading marks, brief remarks, and Monday through Friday “Help Pages.” Other resources include a Reproducible Quiz Template that you can administer as needed. You will create a sentence that is set within the confines of the weekly lessons. Reproducible Pretest there is two versions of the pretest. They are similar with a few variations in the exercise. You can use one before you begin the program and administer the other one at the end of the curriculum. An answer key is provided also that mirrors the student workbook pages.

Student Workbook is a small black and white workbook that has been three-holed punched if you want to put it in a three-ring binder. This is a straightforward workbook with no illustrations. You have a Marking Guide in the front and a sample page that shows an overview of a week’s lesson. The Help Pages are also in the book. Your weekly lessons are broken up by week one, week two, and so forth. You have a place to put in the starting and ending date for each week. Dawn Burnette recommends using different colors of pens for the lessons. She explains this in the video for the teacher.

DGP Academy Instructional Videos gives you access to one-hundred and fifty videos for each lesson. Author Dawn Burnette is the video teacher. The videos are only a few minutes long. Your access to the videos does not expire. As I mentioned earlier you can use this to help you teach the daily lessons or for your student to check their work. You will not want your student to view the lessons before they do the lessons. The videos walk you through the daily lessons and you will see the author do the lesson in full.

We had a bit of a learning curve in the first few weeks. Once we felt more confident in working the daily lesson it went smoothly. My son is average in grammar and we used this as a supplement daily. Each day we sat down and went through the daily lessons together for several weeks. After each lesson I had him watch the video to check his work and other times he used the answer key. He used a different colored pen to correct his mistakes. This let me see if we had any concepts, I felt he needed more instruction on. My son is now doing the lessons independently. My son likes how the videos go through all the steps of the lesson. He felt it helped him grasp concepts he might have missed or struggled with. I have seen improvement in his grammar, and it has reflected in his writing too.

One thing we struggled with was the entire reproducible list. We could not figure out if we preferred using them straight out of the workbook or single copies of each. It felt like a lot to keep track of doing the lessons and losing single sheets. I ended up copying them and laminating the sheets. I punched a hole at the top and put them on a metal ring. That seemed to help my son keep things in order and on task. I would love to see something similar sold as a laminated set. For my family, it would be worth the extra cost to have this as an option.

I have done many grammar programs throughout the years, and Daily Grammar Practice Academy Video Series is unique and unlike any other curriculum, I used in the past. This can be used as a complete curriculum. However, I think for it to be a complete curriculum the parent would need to be fluent in grammatical concepts to best use it. If you are grammatically inclined, then you can easily expound on the lessons if needed. A student in high school that has a good understanding of grammar Daily Grammar Practice Academy Video Series would be a good grammar curriculum for them to utilize as a complete curriculum prepare them for college and have a stronger foundation in grammar. I like that it breaks up each concept daily in small bites and progresses slowly. We plan to continue using Daily Grammar Practice Grade 9 Original from Daily Grammar Publishing this year and are already considering it for next year.

Product review by Renee Knoblauch, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, October 2020