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LA…copywork, dictation, THEN WHAT???
- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 8 months ago by
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We’re not there yet, but I’m thinking ahead.
What does “Language Arts” look like as the children age?
We’ve started out with teaching handwriting (quality over quantity), and moved along to copywork (super-neat lines of readable text, then onto more super-neat lines of quality writings). Now our oldest (9 in 4th grade) is up to dictation.
This has proved to be a boon to his spelling and punctuation techniques. We have a variety of writings to choose from for the dictation.
(This son is a ‘language’ kind of guy and because of that interest, we had him do Vocabulary Vine, a simple Greek/Latin root word program which he is enjoying learning with.)
The dictations started out with a sentence and now he is up to a couple at a time. He studies the passage for new words, we talk about the punctuation and a little grammar (not much yet), and then I read him the passage. Any incorrect words he copies three times. Occasionally I ask him some of the words he missed, and he’s usually gotten them right. (I think this would be valuable to consistently do, but I haven’t remembered yet.)
So, as we continue in this education journey, what is the next step?
I recently read an article in The Homeschool Magazine where Susan Wise Bauer was interviewed. She listed the same steps, and after dictation, she said she started having her students outline passages, and then rewrite them. She also taught students to outline their own thoughts before writing.
I was wondering if I found the next step in the process and hope that someone can respond with some information, links, or experience.
Thanks!
This series we did on Language Arts might help some.
Thank you, Sonya.
So, it seems that in the middle elem and onward years we are to continue with dictation, and adding in more written narrations (which they’ll be able to write well because they’ve practiced all that good writing in their copywork/dictation, right?) and compostition styles.
Am I understanding correctly?
I DO get the emails and read them, but seeing those posts as an answer to my question helped!
Thanks for your time.
Yes, to what your saying. My son, 10, has just begun written narrations. I’ve been looking at something like Writer’s Inc., as a resource, to help develop the structure of writing in all the different composition styles, to instruct on actual how-tos of things and practice those specifically. Either that or Meaningful Composition or Jump-In from Apologia; still making my mind up (I want to look at Writer’s Inc. first, am leaning in that direction, as it would provide the instruction for all areas of writing in one resource -saving lots of $ and using the existing written narrations, something a “curriculum” would not allow so much).
Many on here have sought out these types of things to solidify the writing how-tos and provide direction for correction, in the late mid-to-upper years. The combination of CM’s LA’s makes good writing come fairly effortlessly, IMO. Though, I am not comfortable for them to just do written narrations without any other instruction for them on the specific areas of “proper” writing structure, but I’m not crazy about a bunch of curriculum; that’s part of the rigorous simplicity of CM and I’d like to find a way to maintain that even through theHS years. It seems silly to me to teach composition apart from the written narrations and wonderful books they’ll already be reading (essentially their topics). It’d be two sets of writing they’d be doing if they had a writing curriculum plus writtten narrations to do., kind of a waste of time and opportunity. I just need to do more research first.
Rachel
So, it seems that in the middle elem and onward years we are to continue with dictation, and adding in more written narrations (which they’ll be able to write well because they’ve practiced all that good writing in their copywork/dictation, right?) and compostition styles.
Yes, that’s right. You would also want to include some English Grammar and continue the poetry and Shakespeare. If you download the sample pages of the Language Arts handbook, Hearing and Reading, Telling and Writing, you’ll see a summary chart that might also help.
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