Jolly Grammar
What is Jolly Grammar?
Jolly Grammar is the next stage, after a first year with Jolly Phonics. The materials provide guidance and resources to help teach grammar to children; it is active and multi-sensory, with emphasis on consolidating the children’s knowledge from Jolly Phonics and helping them develop an understanding of how grammar works.
How does Jolly Grammar work?
By teaching key essential grammar rules, it helps children bring diversity to their writing and improve their spelling in a structured way. Jolly Grammar teaches a wide range of language forms including the parts of speech, plurals, punctuation, and the tenses past, present, and future. It also teaches a wide range of spelling rules, including defining aspects such as the short vowels.
​
Jolly Grammar uses colors and actions to help children identify parts of speech in sentences, for example verbs are red and nouns are black. Filled with great ideas and fun ways to remember some of the rules, Jolly Grammar provides teachers with a systematic way to teach grammar, spelling and punctuation.
The Jolly Grammar Program
Jolly Grammar is designed for four years of teaching. Together with Jolly Phonics they provide a course for the first four years.
​
Traditionally, grammar was seen as a formal academic subject, far too difficult for young children to learn. However, with the Jolly Grammar program, young children can be introduced to grammatical concepts in a fun and accessible way.
​
The Jolly Grammar Handbooks provide enough lesson plans and activity pages for 36 weeks, with two one-hour lessons per week. The first of these lessons is devoted to spelling and to increasing the children’s phonic knowledge. The second lesson focuses on teaching grammar. The term ‘grammar’ is used loosely here, and the Jolly Grammar lessons introduce such topics as sentence structure, antonyms and synonyms, punctuation, and dictionary work, as well as teaching the children about parts of speech. Teachers can use Jolly Grammar twice a week to cover the structural aspects of the English language, and devote their remaining literacy lessons to other areas, such as group reading, creative writing, and comprehension exercises.
​
Just as each letter sound was introduced with an accompanying story and action in Jolly Phonics, Jolly Grammar introduces each different part of speech with an associated color and action. The colors and actions not only make the grammar lessons fun for the children, but also make the grammatical terms easier for them to learn. The colors used to introduce each part of speech are the same as those used in Montessori schools.