First Language Lesson or English For a Thoughtful Child

Is it FLL by Jessie Wise?? If so, I have that and EFTTC and I can’t wrap my brain around the FLL, but really enjoy the EFTTC. We’ll be using vol. 2 next school year if I don’t change to a Queens grammar, but my son likes what we’re doing so we may just stick to it. He also uses Grammarland with the worksheets.

Everyone’s different, so for me I have to see the product. I have to see what the font is like, layout of the pages, if it’s scripted, sometimes even the size of the book makes a difference on whether I’ll love it or hate it.

HTH

We really enjoyed FLL with a few kids, and it worked well for my auditory learners. It’s got a lot of poetry memorization, which they really enjoyed, and they always looked forward to the lessons. It does dwell on parts of speech much more than CM would in 1st or 2nd grade I believe, but it is a gentle, sweet program. EFTTC has more writing and older poetry – we used book 2 and really enjoyed that with three of the kids as well. It worked much better for my guy who’s a visual learner and had an undiagnosed hearing loss (no wonder FLL didn’t work well for him – we had no idea at the time!). It requires more of the child in terms of writing but is also gentle and you can adapt it to meet your child’s needs – if the writing assignments are too much, you can take dictation from them and then they can copy it, rather than having to do the composing and writing all at once. We found that worked well with wiggly guys who were overwhelmed with too much writing at once.

FLL takes about 10 min per day.  I never followed it “exactly” though.  I will say, I personally didn’t care for the poetry memorization in FLL.  I prefer more classic poetry…we memorized a couple of them, but skipped most.

It may also depend on the age of the child or their handwriting abilities. I should’ve mentioned that my ds was probably over 8 years old (maybe older) when we started it. I’d even say that he was considered a 3rd grader.

Don’t know if that helps, but as a side note my youngest ds will not be ready for any writing in a grammar book until at least 8…if we started sooner we’d definitely have to use an oral program (or one that can be done orally without sacrifice). His handwriting is just not where his other bro.’s was at this age and that would frustrate him too much.

Yes, I agree with the posters, that for a child who struggles with writing, ETFC might be a bit much. My 14-year-old, a prolific writer now, would crumble to tears at having to write much up until about age 9. We used FLL for both first and second grade for him, and followed it with ETFC 2 in third grade, now that I remember it. I believe this is what we did for three of our boys and it worked well – they were ready by that time. I did add more copywork than FLL recommended (some of the poetry, in appropriate amounts, etc) because I didn’t feel there was enough, and while I prefer classic poetry and stories, my children adored most of them, and can still recite some of the poems. Another thing I gained from the very scripted method: DS14 was the first child I’d homeschooled “from scratch,” and the lessons really helped build my confidence and gave me ideas about how I could go about teaching things like that on my own.