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New to SCM–keep Rod and Staff?
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This will be our first year fully immersed into a CM style. We’ve teetered between it and classical for the past few years. My DD (10 and 12) have done really well with Rod & Staff this year (their first time doing that curriculum and working fairly independently), but with a 5 year old turning six soon and a 2 year old, I see a lot of value in perhaps using something more all in one, such as LLATL, as I need to add dictation and narration into the mix. I’m guessing it will work as well as R&S, but the added benefit seems to be mixing both girls together for grammar/writing/narration/dictation. I am unsure, of course, and don’t want to skip back and forth year to year. Any advice, ideas, or experiences to share?
I have used R&S English with a CM bend on it. We read lessons aloud together, then I used a few of the Q’s for helping narration if needed. I limited the number of sentence diagraming or like exercises to be assigned so they stayed in their age appropriate lesson time suggestions. I assigned copywork when there was a poem of piece of note, that I wanted them to ponder. I dictated sentences to be written rather that getting them to “fill in the blank” so they were modelled good examples. If it was a review lesson I assigned independant reading and narration. we did writing lessons given as is for my older daughter. The writing lessons are sporatically spread throughout, so we did not find it taxing. I did think that somedays, I wish it was just simply a CM program and I didn’t have to work at assigning it, but it was not hard to do really. I don’t know anything about LLATL except I picked it up at a conference and thought it to busy for us. Sorry, can not advise you there. That is really the key though. What works for you. If they clicked with R&S maybe CMing it a bit may bring a fresh use of it. I hope you find what works best!
We used LLATL this past year. I’ll be switching to ELTL for the coming year. I liked the higher levels of LLATL well enough (the first two books had quite a bit of busywork and not enough reading practice IMO). The dictation wasn’t really prepared dictation which bothered me. My DC didn’t spend enough time studying the passage before we did their dictation lesson. With all the other tasks in the language arts lessons, it was difficult to give them extra time for studying it. I also didn’t care for lessons 5 days per week. ELTL has 3 lessons and that should make our day less hectic (with now 4 school aged DC). You may be interested in ELTL as it’s CM/classical based and includes narration, dictation, copywork, sentence diagramming/grammar, poetry, picture study, and literature. You may be able to combine your DDs into one level as well.
Have you looked into Spelling Wisdom? Some moms here use it for both copywork and dictation. I’m debating using it in place of ELTL’s dictation (since I already own the first two levels). You could continue with R&S English and easily add in SW. SCM just added a grammar program to go along with Spelling Wisdom, but I haven’t looked closely at it. If you wanted a more all-in-one program, it might be worth a look. If I hadn’t already purchased ELTL, I would be considering it.
Narration is easy enough to add in to the remaining subjects: Bible, history, science, etc. Just have them do some oral narrations each day and have the do a written one once a week or so.
There is lots of great curriculum to choose from and it makes our decisions so difficult! Just keep in mind there are many ways to have a CM education. Also, make sure you aren’t doubling up on some language arts areas. Some moms schedule more than one dictation or grammar program and it makes things overly complicated more often than not.
English Lessons Through Literature
http://barefootmeandering.com/site/lessons-through-literature/eltl/
You can get free samples from their bookstore.
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