English For the Thoughful Child

Well…I have used several different things in the past (First Language Lessons (Well-Trained Mind), Abeka Language (1st grade), Winter Promise LA (2nd & 3rd grades/did not finish and got a refund), and most recently Queen’s Language Lessons (okay, but did not fit into our plan/schedule).

Queen’s had beautiful full color pictures for the picture studies, and was easily understood by my children, but it was a little too light. The copywork was also not enough for us and we use Bible verses for copy work anyway. We skipped the copywork and zoomed through the workbooks. It was just not enough meat.

EFTC is meatier, in my opinion. I ordered Vol. 1 for my son (2nd grade/ age 7) and Vol. 2 for my daughter (3rd grade/ age 9).

 Vol. 1 starts with explaining what a sentence is, having them copy some sentences, and then shows examples of incomplete sentences.

Then lesson 2 talks about statements and has an exercise for the children to write statements about the sun. For example: Write a statement that tells where the sun rises.  My son felt like he had really accomplished something when he was able to write his own sentence about the sun. I had to explain about the rising of the sun and all that too, so we learned a lot in one little sentence. In writing this one sentence we also had to remember to start with a capital letter, spell the words correctly, and end with a period.

Lesson 3 is an oral composition exercise. Lesson 4 teaches about questions and they must answer questions in complete sentences for the exercise. Lesson 5 is a poem to memorize and lesson 6 is a picture lesson with questions to answer. Later on it gets into how to write a paragraph, writting a letter, addressing an envelope, capitalization, nouns, dictation sentences, quotation marks, and commas with quotation marks.

Vol. 2 has a lot of the same things, but adds more parts of speech, more quotation exercises that are more complicated, plural and possessive nouns, homonyms, and writing titles of poems, books, etc.

We are planning to begin Learning Language Arts Through Literature soon and I was going to use EFTC in the meantime. However, these lessons are so good and so short that I may use both! EFTC seems to really help with composition. My children need that extra help right now. Other “grammar” programs that I have tried do not make children think this much and have to compose sentences like this. I really like it.