New Music: Grammaropolis

Since I'm on a grammar kick of late, I should mention a second source of no-really-it's-fun learning on the subject that Dash has been obsessed with lately: Grammaropolis, an album of songs about language and parts of speech. The CD came out earlier this year, but recently came to my attention on its reissue with a new iPad/iPhone app, which nicely complements the subscription-based learning Grammaropolis website.

If this sounds like a little entertainment-based-learning empire, that's because it is; former middle-school teacher and current children's-book author Coert Voorhees, aka the Mayor of Grammaropolis, devised the website—which anthropomorphizes parts of speech to show what they do and how they work, giving each its own "neighborhood" kids can explore. (It's been a real success, winning the National Parenting Center's Seal of Approval this year; it costs $3.99 a month, or $34.99 annually to subscribe.) The new Word Sort by Grammaropolis iPad/iPhone app ($1.99) adds a game to the proceedings, in which kids try to put each word in its proper category.

But its the album itself, which features both the Mayor himself and songs by kids' musician Doctor Noize, that is delighting our seven-year-old most right now. The good Doctor—known in real life (I assume) as Cory Cullinan—proves quickly to be a master of pastiche rivaling the creators of the classic Schoolhouse Rock bits (he even tosses in a few sly references to them—e.g., a repeated "hallelujah" in the backing vocals to a techno-tinged sing about interjections). Cullinan is also an alarmingly accomplished musician, not only writing and arranging the clever songs in a multitude of styles (everything from classic silent-movie-accompaniment piano to a Steely Dan homage) but also playing nearly every instrument you hear—keyboards, guitars, horns, you name it.

Most of all, though, both the Doctor and the Mayor are funny, which is really what makes the album irresistible to kids. (A particular favorite of Dash's is the song in which the supercool character Slang crashes a radio program on which the Mayor had intended to stuffily condemn nonstandard vocabulary.) And that, in turn, lets all the grammar lessons the songs are really about just seep in without really even feeling like learning. As those of us who can still recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution mainly because Schoolhouse Rock set it to music all those years ago, it's remarkably effective.



[Cover image courtesy of Doctor Noize]

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New Books: Super Grammar

Okay, before I start, full disclosure: I make my living largely as a copy editor. And I've occasionally been accused by certain close friends and family members of being a bit, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to enforcing proper grammar. (I will spare you my thoughts on gerunds here, however. You're grateful, trust me.)

That said, even my wife—who may or may not be one of the family members mentioned above—has been disturbed at the rumors that English grammar is no longer taught in any structured manner in many or most grade schools. Our oldest is only in second grade this year, which as far as I can recall would be kinda early for discussions of dangling participles anyway, so I'm not really sure how true that rumor is. (The limited investigation I've done leads me to think there's at least something to it.)

Either way, given that Dash is a fairly advanced reader for his age, and given my profession, I had been vaguely wishing there might be a way of giving him an understanding of the basic building blocks of sentence structure and the like. Ideally, one that didn't involve my teaching him on weekends out of old, dry grammar textbooks from the 1980s. (That would not go well, I fear.)

So when I first laid eyes on Tony Preciado and Rhode Montijo's Super Grammar, a comic-book approach to basic grammar, I had high hopes. Which I then immediately tempered. After all, most attempts at making potentially dull subjects "fun," I have found, fail by leaning too far one way or the other: They're either so concerned with getting the educational points across that they aren't much fun at all, or they're lots of fun...without any real educational takeaway to speak of.

Still, I figured, leafing through the pages about superheroes (like The Proper Noun and The Preposition) and supervillains (like Comma Splice and The Fragment), it was worth a shot.
And turns out: Preciado and Montijo got the balance exactly right, at least for our kid. Dash is very much into graphic novels and comic books of all kinds nowadays (he's even starting to create his own), so Super Grammar was right in his wheelhouse thematically from the start. He saw it, picked it up, and consumed it in a day, without any exhortation from any pesky adults.

Now, Super Grammar is by no means the most complex of comics—there's no narrative as such, just a series of introductions of the "characters" and examples of their exploits (each of which serves as a grammatical example). The illustrations themselves are what I'd term "classic comic-book style," quite well executed but nothing fancy or especially artsy, either.

But the combination gets the job done marvelously. Dash liked Super Grammar so much from the get-go that it's become one of what I call his "lingering" books—it stays out on his desk or nightstand so he can read it again, and again (and again), over a period of weeks. It's even accompanied us on a couple of trips already.

And the book does have educational impact, it would appear—Dash appears to have a better conception of what an action verb is, or what purpose a pronoun serves, than he did before, and we've noticed his use of punctuation in particular improving since the book arrived in our home.

So while I don't expect that Super Grammar will—or should!—be the end of his education on the subject (one way or another), it's serving exactly the role I'd hoped it might: an easy, low-effort primer on the basics of grammar. And that—well, that's a pretty heroic accomplishment.

[Cover image courtesy of Scholastic]

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