Caught’ya!: Grammar with a Giggle

by Jane Bell Kiester

Maupin House Publishing

Grammar review can be truly customized using Jane Kiester’s ideas from Caught’ya! The teacher uses a story (either already written by someone else or invented) as the primary vehicle for review. It helps if the story is funny or takes unexpected twists and turns.

Each day the teacher writes a few sentences on the board, leaving out all capitalization and punctuation. Students copy the sentences, putting in proper capitalization and punctuation. Vocabulary words can be incorporated. Stories and/or sentences can be adapted to review whatever grammatical skills students need.

Caught’ya outlines the methodology and includes three sample stories—one each for grades 3-5, grades 6-8, and grades 9-11. Since the book is not written for Christian audiences, you might want to find or make up your own stories rather than use these. (I suggest using stories with which your children are not familiar to maintain their interest in “What happens next?”) However, the stories will give you excellent models with which to work.

This method is truly fun, and it works well across fairly wide age spans at junior/senior high levels. We used this method very successfully for one year with our boys when they ranged from ages 11-16. There is also a sequel with more stories titled Caught’ya Again!, but it suffers from content problems.