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Advice Needed ;)
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Sorry in advance for the length of this post…
I am revamping before beginning again in Jan with school. My oldest (age 11) recently suggested that we BURN her Rod & Staff English book and my youngest (age 9) is not retaining anything we have tried to learn in First Language Lessons. I have re-read all of the info on the SCM site that pertains to teaching language arts and have FINALLY come to the conclusion that……you older, more experienced folks are right! LOL!!
Seriously! I have had a really hard time letting go of teaching grammar the traditional way but I can now see the reasons for doing it the way CM suggested. Neither of my children understand the parts of speech at this point in time. They may be able to spit out the definition of a noun, but cannot pick one out of a sentence that is not in their workbook. Neither of them can diagram a sentence outside of their workbooks either. My daughter (the oldest) has the tendency to put up a wall and stop listening to me when the grammar book comes out, but that is her personality. If she does not understand the purpose of something or see that it is useful to her, she will shut down. She has been pushed more that my younger one and she has been like a poor little guinea pig testing out so many different things for language. My younger one is not so vehemently against grammar, but I cannot see that he has really learned anything either. The conclusion: waiting IS better and I have wasted time trying to teach grammar when we should have been working on habits, life skills, or ANYTHING else!
I have also looked back over the past few years of our homeschooling and the year that we wholeheartedly did everything recommended on the SCM curriculum guide was our best year…hands down! So, I’m wanting to change some things to get back on track and I need a little advice.
I do not want to continue with the grammar programs we were using and I want to work more on narrations with both children. I need suggestions for what to do. According to the SCM Curr. guide my 4th grader should not be working on grammar right now and my 5th grader should be doing JAG. Should I order JAG and do it with my older child and give the younger a break? Should I just give them both a grammar break and do JAG with them both next year? Should I order Queen’s Lang. Lessons for them to use until they are old enough for AG? Do you have any other suggestions? What do you all think? I’m all ears!!
Oh..also…science has been a joke at our house this year. We have been reading aloud from an Abek text that was given to me by a friend. Any suggestions on how I could make science a combined subject with them both using living books or anything more interesting?
We’re using English for the Thoughtful child with my 7 year old, and do most of it orally – she really enjoys it, we totally skip dictation and I’ll have her read the passage and do a narration instead. The other day, I wrote up one of the exercises on the board – it was a half dozen sentences about Little Red Ridinghood – where DD7 had to put quotation marks around the quotes – my DD5 joined in and they went back and forth doing the sentences – DD5 loved it so much she was a bit jealous that SHE doesn’t get to do grammar! So that might be a nice gentle, quick intro for your son, it’s probably too little for your older one.
I talked with my husband and I think I am going to just take a grammar break to focus on spelling, typing, and narration with both children for the rest of this year.
We can do JAG next year when they will be in the 5th and 6th grades, maybe do the JAG Mechanics the next year and AG after that. We have so many other good things that we need to focus and really work on. 🙂
How about doing 17 weeks of Grammarland with the worksheets? You mentioned in another post that you were going to do it-did you ever do it? I’ve been doing it with my 11 and 10 yr. old; I printed out the small book, bound it and also printed out the worksheets for each of them in their own 3-pronged binder and we do it 1x a week. It’d be a good change of pace; we find it quite amusing!
Then you could use Intermediate Language Lessons (w/the teacher’s guide, I heartily recommend-I bought at Amazon) with both of them and then Our Mother Tongue at the 7/8/9th gr. level. That way you don’t have to get two different things and one book can be used for both children. Continue with dictation and narrations and you’re good (there’s dictation in ILL, which you can skip if you use SW, like we do). Obviously, ILL covers more than just grammar; it is dealing with language skills as a whole.
Also, if you’re not doing a foreign language, esp. Latin, then that may be something worth looking into. As an aside, I have the Writer’s Inc. handbook (http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Inc-Handbook-Learning-Revision/dp/0669471860 )as a reference book when we need to look things up and it is most helpful (and cheap when bought used) and gives me more confidence when teaching.
Of course, the JAG/AG series is also an option, but is is more workbookish in style (thought ehlessons are short from what I undestand) and they may do well with a break from that particular style.
HTH,
Rachel
This uses literature passages to teach gammar. KISS Grammar
The website seems confusing, but a few levels are available as free pdfs. Scroll down and you will see that the third and sixth levels have blue links “doc” and “AK” next to them. These are the free pdfs…doc is the main text and AK is the analysis key. Each level goes through the same topics with the higher levels just using more complex literature passages. This covers grammar basics without traditional sentence diagrams…before moving into AG. We have this downloaded on my ipad in the notability app…so we can write directly on the screen and don’t have to print.
Rachel,
We did do Grammarland 🙂 and Rod & Staff, and FLL3 & 4
I really do believe that a break is what they need for now.My oldest is going through Getting Started With Latin right now too. I am also going to schedule 3 days a week to have narration editing time with my oldest one. So I think that if she continues with Latin 3 days a week, begins writing more narrations and editing them with me 3 days a week and keeps up spelling, copywork (book of mottos using Spelling Wisdom for inspiration), and begins typing instruction she will be very busy 🙂
My younger needs lots of work on narration and spelling so we will focus on that and let him begin typing too.
Thank you for replying, Bookworm! I value your opinon very much. Remember our discussion on writing curriculum not too long ago? I copied it all and saved it on my computer so that I could go back and remind myself why I am doing things the way I have chosen to do them. Your advice is always very helpful to me.
Thanks again,
Amanda
I really do believe that a break is what they need for now.
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