So many teachers in the UK (perhaps you can tell me about your experience in your country) were not, themselves, taught grammar explicitly when they were of school age during the 1970s and 80s. You can understand the reasoning. Children acquire the rules of English, certainly sufficiently well, simply by listening and joining in. You will hear evidence of this going on when a child uses a word like drived or sheeps. Clearly, they have spotted some rules: how to make the past tense and how to make a singular noun plural. It just so happens that the verb and noun in these particular cases are irregular - they break the rules.
As a result of their own schooling, therefore, during which they felt they got by, teachers might feel cautious about throwing themselves wholeheartedly into teaching grammar.
What, I think, we should not do, however, is turn that caution into a justification and an argument for not teaching grammar. There are a range of resources and there is support for professional development widely available. Also, it doesn't have to be dry. It doesn't have to be learning by rote. Nor does it have to be in opposition to creative writing. It should be part of the exciting, colourful landscape children experience along the road of their imagination, on the way to putting the words down on paper. After all, children up to the age of eleven have to learn all sorts of technical concepts in other subjects: water cycle, condensation, femur, germination, meander, oxbow lake, trapezium, Venn diagram, and so on.
Why not allow children the right to experience a similarly academic approach to their own language. Nothing is lost.
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