Any mamas here use Shurley Grammar? If so, would you post a review of it? We've done little bits and pieces of grammar here and there, but dd1 will be doing 4th grade in the fall, and I want to make sure we cover all the "important" grammar stuff. I've heard mixed reviews of Shurley---many say it's hard to figure out and requires a lot of planning on the parent's part. Others say it's the only way to go. If you don't like or use Shurley, what do you recommend?

I have a friend who swears by it, loves it to death. But when I looked at her teachers manual my eyes bugged out LOL it was just way too complicated, IMO for me to try to implement.

We've used it a few years. When I looked at it at first, *my* eyes bugged out, too, LOL! I handed it to ds who was in 9th grade at the time, and said, "guess what, you're doing a grammar class for N, S, and C next year". I had ulterior motives - grammar was not his strong suit and I thought teaching several grades below his own would be a great review.

That said, we (well, HE) taught the grammar portion and not the writing portion (both are in the manual, but we were doing writing elsewhere). If you can carve out some time before your school year starts and figure out the silly thing, it is well worth it IMO.

All of them were soon identifying complicated parts of sentences, really comfortable and fluent with grammar, including the then-second-grader. Very very nice program if you have the patience to figure it all out. And I think it would work equally well with one student as it did with our little class of 3 students.