Emma Serl PLL&ILL VS. Using language well

I just finished week 1 of school. We started ULW 1 & 2 at our house. I too, had bought Serl’s LL. I got the Serl because they are similar to First Language Lessons, which we have done and my children did not love. Why get something they didn’t love? I thought maybe the Serl were more CM than 1LL. I wasn’t sure how to give my own CM method lessons really, and I thought 1LL was close. Anyways, happy to be done with them. We also have used Queen Homeschool Language Lessons with much more success and they very much enjoyed them. All though intended for a younger age, my 13yo needed a review, something to help her own grammar.

THE ULW books are AWESOME. This week after lesson 2, my daughter (of whom English Language Arts is her least favourite subject) closes her book and says,

“Charlotte Mason sure has a way with Language Arts and me. I get this!”

She had made a connection with nouns as ideas.

My son, exhibited joy and satisfaction in his transcribing, moving up from copywork. He is 10. Reading and writing have not come easy to him. To see him happy in this, priceless.

It warms my heart and I thanked The Lord for a good choice. We have found a good fit for us. Thank you SCM team for a wonderful curriculum.

Possibly someone with more experience with Serl will reply, but this is our recent experience with ULW.

I have the PLL and ILL PDF workbooks. I liked them, but not enough to continue. They just felt like a lot of writing. We did it orally, but my DD likes to do her work, not wait for me.

We used ULW with SW this year and really like it. I like that it included SW (which worked well for my DD last year, used it for copy work and transcription)) and intro to grammar with ULW. That it uses the passages from SW that the student is studying for dictation as the grammar lesson because it makes sense to be to study one selection, not jump around for LA. It just feels very fluid to have it combined and just the right amount if writing so the student is not overwhelmed. We started written narration (once/week for 4th grade) and if we had continued with ILL doing SW for spelling and written narrations it would have been a lot of writing.

I also really like that if you start in 3rd grade with part one of SW and ULW it has use using it for copy work into transcription. I tried dictation in 3rd but am glad I set it aside and tried again in 4th it went much smoother! This year my DD is doing part 2 of SW and ULW with great success.

I’ve used both the hard back books and the PDFs of PLL and ILL. The PDFs do have too much writing for my taste (and my boys!). It seems the best way to do these books is to go through orally until you reach something that needs writen, like a letter etc… That worked fine for some of my kids but if you want something they can do on their own it won’t work for everyone.

MFW has redone the first few levels and they look really nice. I think they are called  Language Lessons for today. I think eventually they will redo all the levels. I’m not thrilled that they put grade numbers on them. I don’t push my boys to read and write at a young age, so I don’t want them looking at the grade on their book and thinking they’re behind.

I REALLY like the look of ULW but, because I have students of all ages, I’m waiting to see if anymore levels will be available for the next school year.

HTH!