About This Book

New Grammar Time Student Book 1 is Student Book 1 of New Grammar Time — the pupil’s volume of a primary grammar course, the book learners hold while the course’s Teacher’s Books guide from behind. Its served file carries the exact title. Book 1 covers the foundations of English grammar at entry level: the first verb forms, the basic word order, the earliest question shapes, presented for children meeting grammar as a subject for the first time.

A first pupil’s grammar book succeeds or fails on tone. The grammar itself is genuinely simple at this level — the challenge is entirely presentational: rules must arrive as discoveries inside activities, examples must live in the child’s world of family, school, animals, and play, and every page must be completable, because early success is the curriculum’s real content. Children form their theory of grammar in these first months — whether it is a set of patterns they can operate or a set of laws they keep breaking — and the theory, once formed, is remarkably durable. Student Book 1 is built accordingly: short units, visible progress, characters who make the same mistakes the learners make and survive them smiling. For the teacher, the pupil book’s clarity is what makes the Teacher’s Book’s guidance usable — the class shares one visible artefact, page by page. For parents, it is the first English schoolbook that comes home with opinions attached: this page was fun, this one was easy, look what I can say. A course is a promise kept across levels, and this volume keeps the first instalment: grammar time as a good time.

What Learners Will Practise

First Verb Forms

Learners practise the entry-level forms of English: being and having, the present simple in its first uses, the affirmative and negative shapes. Forms are met inside short exchanges and labelled examples, so the pattern is always attached to a meaning the child already wants to express.

Asking and Answering

The book practises question formation from the start — the inverted shapes of English questions and their short answers — because questions are the engine of classroom talk. A child who can ask has a tool for every later lesson, in every subject the language touches.

The Sentence’s Skeleton

Learners practise basic word order: who does what, where things are, the fixed furniture of the English sentence. Word order is English’s quiet grammar — few endings, strict sequence — and Book 1 builds the sequence habit before exceptions arrive to complicate it.

Key Features

The gentle gradient is the feature: nothing in Book 1 requires knowledge the book has not already given. The pupil-facing design is the second — this is the child’s own artefact, not a script for adults — and the course fit the third, foundations cut to exactly the shape the later Student Books will build on. In this collection it stands at the foot of the New Grammar Time shelf.

Who This Book Is For

Young learners beginning formal grammar are its first audience, typically in their first or second year of English. Their teachers form its second readership, introducing structure without fear. Parents make its third, following along at home — often learning the metalanguage (‘present simple’, ‘question form’) alongside their children.

How to Use This Book

Keep early grammar oral before it is written: say the pattern, play with it, then meet it on the page. Praise correct construction loudly and correct by recasting — repeat the child’s sentence properly as if agreeing — so the flow of attempts never stops. Short, frequent meetings with the book beat long ones; Book 1 is a daily companion, not a weekend event.

Related Books

The shelf’s teacher volume stands at New Grammar Time Teacher’s Book 4, and the grammar-in-context summit waits at Macmillan English Grammar In Context Advanced Book.