LA help please! Questons re: Spelling Wisdom, ULW

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  • December 29, 2016 at 2:13 pm
    2Corin57
    Participant

    I’m honestly still undecided on our LA for my son who is in grade 4 (9.5 years old).

    We had been using Primary Language Lessons and I personally love it. Can’t say it enough just how much I love this program, and I can really see my son’s oral composition skills improving with it. However, my son does not like it. Problem being he has some milder special needs which as a result of he is a) an extremely visual learner b) has some fine motor struggles c) has some auditory processing struggles.

    So… it’s honestly not the greatest match for him. While he likes that he can read the text himself, many of the lessons require copying several sentences, which gets tiring for him. He has started saying he hates it because it’s too much copying. So, I tried doing it more orally, but that doesn’t work well either because he gets overwhelmed with auditory input, and he despises being asked questions orally etc… just because they’re harder to process etc…. Essentially? He’s a workbook kid – give him something that he can read himself and fill in the answers.  I did toy with the idea of typing out several of the lessons and turning them more into workbook pages for him, but I really have no interest in doing that level of work.

    So…. I ordered Christian Light Education Language Arts. And I confess – it’s a perfect match for him, but… my heart breaks a bit as it’s such a complete opposite to the CM approach I was loving with PLL. And I don’t find the critical thinking skills are there, like they are with PLL. It’s more “fill in the right answers”.

    So… I’m trying to find a happy medium and I’m looking at Spelling Wisdom with Using Language Well. It would give him the CM approach that I like, the ability to read the lesson himself and not have as much writing to do. BUT… where would  place him?

    Also, do I absolutely have to get the Teacher’s Guide, especially for the first book? From the sample it seems as though I could get by without?

    December 29, 2016 at 6:05 pm
    Sonya Shafer
    Moderator

    I believe you can get PLL in workbook format. If PLL is your preference, that could save you some time.

    Regarding where to place him in SW and ULW: My first thought would be to start at the beginning of Book 1 because the transcription passages would be very short and the lessons would be oral but also typed out so he could read them himself and then answer orally. If you start in the middle of the book, you would be giving him much longer passages, and it sounds like that could be discouraging for him. If you start at the beginning, you could also use the weeks spent on lessons 1-70 to teach him to type. If he could type the dictation exercises (once he gets to lesson 71-ish), the length wouldn’t be as much of an obstacle for him. Keep in mind that the recommended schedule is two lessons per week, which means a book will last for two years.

    Regarding the teacher book: It contains the answers to the questions in ULW, but it also has the rubrics and tips for easing into and evaluating written narrations that you would assign in history, science, etc. If you don’t need either of those, you could probably get by without a teacher book.

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