I'm looking for Language arts . Please help!!!

Just curious why you wouldn’t use Sonlight for history as well?  It seems the history and language arts are somewhat related with books covering a certain time period. 

WinterPromise also provides a literature based history. 

We personally LOVED Mystery of History with supplemental book lists and are now using TruthQuest.   I like the freedom of being able to choose from the massive book lists in the TQ guides :))

Blessings,

Melissa

http://reflectionsfromdrywoodcreek.blogspot.com/

Yes, the cores are pricey.  We’ve used Sonlight in the past and to be honest, I found the instrutor guides cumbersome.  I also LOVE the look of their LA, but never managed to use it as written, lol.  We really just prefer to read the books as we encounter the subject matter or time period, supplementing our other history. 

Do you have access to a good library?  Even if you decide to purchase just the instructor guides for the Language Arts piece, you could still use the Sonlight history by obtaining the books from the library so you wouldn’t have to purchase the whole core.  I believe the IG have the schedule for Bible, History/Geography, Readers, Read Alouds, and Language Arts.  The IG run about $100 each, so you’d have $300 into all three cores.  Also, have you considered buying used?  I purchased and pieced together our Sonlight guides used for $10 to $20 each. 

I hope this is making sense, I’m trying to multi task this morning and I feel that I’m not doing it very successfully 🙂

Blessings to you in your decision,

Melissa

http://reflectionsfromdrywoodcreek.blogspot.com/

@redheadmom11: Do you have some resource or something to give your children lapbooking ideas/inspiration? I think my dd8 would really enjoy lapbooking as a way to combine, collect ? written narrations when we get there. But I don’t want to use pre-printed pages either.

@bethanna- all I did when I decided to try lapbooking was google lapbooking blogs and images. I spent some time doing that and came away with a good grasp of what it was all about. While most people do use the printables, I paid special attention to those who did not because my printer was broken, and I couldn’t print anything anyway. This turned out to be a blessing for us because I later talked with someone who tried, unsuccessfully, to implement lapbooking. It turned out the problem was the printables. They were too much like worksheets and left nothing to the imagination. Not using the printables opened the floodgates of creativity for us. I will usually give the kids suggestions on what they MIGHT want to do- mini-books, word scrambles, trivia questions, fact sheets, etc., but they can choose to do anything they want beyond my suggestions, also. For example, we read The Story of Money. My 9 year old drew and cut out a piggy bank, glued it to the lapbook with an opening in the top for a coin slot. She then made coins which she could actually put in the piggy bank and a pocket to keep them in. This was all her idea- they have free reign of what they’ll do. As she was working on her money lapbook,, she started learning about the Presidents on the money, and this led to another lapbook on George Washington, complete with a short biography, a mini-book, trivia questions, and portraits she drew of him. (She was very thorough. She drew him from the front, side, and back! :)) Anyway, my kids really enjoy it, and some of them even do lapbooking on their own in their free time. Maybe I should invest in shares of Staples for all the file folders I’ll be buying! I hope this helps!