Teaching grammar without a workbook

retrofam – I have heard and maybe even checked out some of the resources you mentioned. We have been down the road with Barton Reading System, and that became monotonous. it was a help for a while, but then became more of a focus on spelling. That was very frustrating for my daughter, trying to remember spelling rules. She could read the words, just had trouble spelling them. I have been using Soaring With Spelling, along with Growing With Grammar. Those are short and simple lessons. After talking with my daughter this morning and really thinking over things, I have decided to continue the grammar, but change up on the spelling. The grammar does stay on one part of speech for a while, at least in the book she is doing now, just simple noun, pronoun, and verb lessons. I will check Stevenson spelling, but what I am thinking in my daughter’s case, if I have her doing copywork, she is learning to spell.

Years ago, with my older girls, we did Learning Adventures. The author of LA said that the best way to learn spelling is by reading and writing. This lady has a degree in writing, if I remember correctly. Giving my daughter a list of words to memorize seems somewhat ineffective. I’m thinking if I focus on her reading and have her doing copywork, she will be learning to spell. Soaring With Spelling is good, but there are some areas that I don’t think fit with someone with dyslexia, like finding the list word in a string of letters. For example, sfirmn has the word firm in it. They have some small wordsearch and she is doing better at those, if there are not many letters, but that doesn’t seem to be the best for dyslexia. So, I am leaning toward doing spelling by having her write sentences, probably similar to dictation, but not worry about punctuation, other than capitals and ending marks. Since we met her at 2.5 years old (she’s adopted), she always loved to take paper and pencil and pretend she was writing, even just squiggles across the lines. She would fill up a sheet of paper doing that. So, she has done pretty well learning cursive. I began a couple of weeks ago having her work in an Abeka cursive writing skillbook. I have decided that is going too. I will just have her copy the Scripture passages we are working on, and not make cursive be a burden. She really enjoyed leaning it last year, but now it has become drudgery. I was having her do it every day, just because I wanted to take her through the book this year. But, cursive is not something she needs to do every day. I was overloading her with workbooks! So, I am down to one workbook. Grammar. Four was overkill!

mrsmccardell – It is a good feeling being able to give my daughter what she needs in a way that is outside the box. One thing that did help was when the principal of the ps who looks at our hs work each year said just a couple of months ago that I could teach her however I wanted to. Coming from someone in the ps system, that was huge for me. It was freeing. I wish I would have known all these things when I homeschooled my older three. I have never been very creative, but this has helped to instill a little creativity in me:) I was a little overwhelmed this morning when I really started thinking about how I was going to accomplish these things without workbooks or a guide. But, I am determined to do it. I have finally gotten the math restructured (without workbooks). Now the language. Thanks for your encouragement.

retrofam – Thanks for the spelling ideas. i will keep Stevenson in mind. It does sound like a good way to teach spelling. I want to try it without a guide and see how that works before I purchase anything else.