Introduction

I congratulate Lyn Stone on building an excellent bridge between modern grammar and the primary classroom. The easy explanations, modelled analyses and classroom material should make it highly accessible to school teachers whose expertise lies elsewhere. Particularly important, in my opinion, are the very simple diagrams that she offers, for showing how the words in a sentence fit together to make a single unified meaning; syntax without diagrams is like geography without maps. Both teachers and pupils will appreciate these simple tools for exploring sentence structure; and maybe, in the long run, the children will even have these little diagrams in their minds in their more creative moments.