Our 7yod is using Queen’s and, as Tristan mentioned, the poetry copywork lessons are too drawn out for her. At her request, she completes more than one lesson when she gets to a poem. This is increasing her copywork stamina, again, as Tristan talked about in her review. She’s still liking it at this point. She wants to continue it.
She alternates between Queen’s and Primary Language Lessons, by Emma Serl. We’ve always used Serl’s books with our other children. She was gifted Queen’s and enjoys it, too. Her grammar lessons alternate from one book to the other, but she has asked to do both most days. She’s that kind of kid!
PLL is certainly much more inexpensive. It’s non consumable and it’s based on the very same types of lessons as Queen’s program. (I’m quite curious as to whether they patterned it after PLL, or if the methods are just so similar that it seems to be the case.)
I can’t offer an alternative, other than a do it yourself approach. I’m sold on either of these for elementary grammar studies.
I too have found the same complaint with my children that they don’t like having the copywork for days on end or, worse yet, the dictation that drones on and on in the high school book (they are long passages too). My DD is doing the first high school book and she LOVES the writing instruction portion of it, but she detests the dictation and editing practice lessons.
I have thought about having the kids skip around in the books and do one copywork per week so we’re going a little out of order, but I’m not sure if I can keep track of all that very easily.
My youngest is using English for the Thoughtful Child and I really like that, tho I used Emma Serl books with the older ones and liked those too. I just personally needed to change it up for me so I opted for that book instead.
Overall, I love how gentle the Queen books are, but I too really hate the price of them only because they are consumable.
I tried it for my then 7 yo son. It was very gentle and included picture study and some written narration. I’m sure the copywork and picture studies were helpful, but he did not retain any of the grammar. Although he liked it fine, I switched to something in hopes of higher grammar retention. We have used Writing Tales, which spends two weeks focused on one grammar lesson and includes copywork, spelling, narration… It was better, but I have to keep reminding him of things we covered already. I am actually thinking of doing R & S English grammar for 5th grade though.
I only used the 2nd book in the series (the titles of them confuse me….”LL for Little Ones”, “LL for the Very Young”, etc – my idea is that very young ought to come first, but I think it actually second. So anyway, I don’t know which book I used, but i know it was the 2nd, if you start at the youngest.)
But I really liked it for my 3 going on 4yo, at the time. It was short and sweet and just perfect for a 2nd or 3rd or 4th born who wants to do school, who’s ready for school, but when Mom doesn’t have hte time or energy to do a real “pre-school” or K4 curriculum.
I don’t really like any of the others in the series, though. They just don’t seem meat-y enough….or like they skip around too much, and there’s not much practice….Please keep in mind that I haven’t used any others, just looked through them at conventions.