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How to Make Your Own LA Curriculum
- This topic has 11 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 3 years ago by
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Talk to me about how you go about making your own LA curriculum! I’m normally a curriculum gal. I like knowing that all of my bases are covered and also the simplicity of not having to do as much planning. It lightens my load- most of the time. But I am also very vulnerable to becoming a slave to the curriculum. I’m a box checker! However, I am feeling more and more of a pull towards ditching curriculum for LA next school year, but quite frankly I’m scared! I own Hearing and Reading, Telling and Writing but still find myself very insecure about it all. How do you go about deciding what to have your children use for copywork or dictation? How do you know if you’ve covered things that you need to be covering? How do you choose what to have them do for narration? How do you keep lessons varied and interesting? Why did you decide to “go rogue?” Do you regret going rogue? I wish there was a nice sequential list of what to cover and a bare-bones schedule of what to pull from or something. A framework with nothing filled in, if that makes sense. Oh, if only!
I have always kept things simple.
Read Alouds for 20-30min every day. Copywork(and later dictation!) comes from our family read alouds, narration comes from things my kids have read on their own(and always want to tell me about it!) and what we’ve read as a family. We throw in creative writing once or twice a week and we have a well-rounded language arts. And yes, 2 of my kids use All about Spelling. I am all for simple though!
Thanks for sharing, Alysee123. That sounds so beautifully simple. Just doing the things that we are already do plus some writing instead of doing what we already do plus a complete LA program on top of it all.
I do it for high school, but only because I consider grammar and spelling to be finished by then, so we can concentrate on reading and writing instead, and those are easier to “go rogue” with, in my opinion. 🙂 Which age group are you asking about?
We also add in Grammar around age 8-10. Do 1-2 years and then I don’t feel they need more than that.
ErinD I suppose I’m asking in general, but in a more immediate sense, my kids are currently all elementary school aged (or younger). Next school year I will have kids in 4th, 2nd, and 1st plus a baby and toddler. They’re all good readers and love making their own stories so I feel like they just need gentle guidance rather than a complete curriculum. But they also got this way- at least partially- because of the curriculum we’ve been using, so who knows!
My son (5th grade) uses Spelling Wisdom and Using Language Well for grammar and dictation. The rest is from read-alouds (which I don’t have him narrate); independent reads (I have him narrate 1-2x a week, though he reads nightly; there’s a shelf of books at his level from which he can choose for these); I have him complete 2-3 written narrations per week on his independent read or other books he’s reading for history or science (and use the rubrics in ULW). For end of term exams, I select dictation and parsing paragraphs from our read-alouds, in addition to asking narration questions. It’s simple and working well.
Thank you, Andrea!
Is there a resource that any of you ladies know of that gives suggestions about how often to do copywork, narrations, etc. based on the child’s age or grade. Obviously something like this isn’t black and white, but I just have no idea how often or how much of each thing they should be doing.
https://www.amblesideonline.org/LangArtsScopeSeq.shtml Here’s a general LA scope & sequence.
There is also Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell, or Susan Wise Bauer’s Writing With Ease Instructor Text. Both of those have guidelines of what to do when.
Thank you so much! I have the Karen Glass book but haven’t read it yet so I’m glad to know that’s in there and the Ambleside link is great!
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