I am glad you found it helpful, Andrea. I certainly do not have all of the answers, but I am glad to share our experiences. We are loving Spelling Wisdom. My son turned 11 this past spring, in grade 5. All year we did 2 passages per week. Day 1 he read aloud and we discussed meanings, grammar, punctuation, etc. (And we learned what it means to put your arms akimbo.) He did copywork this day and practiced writing words he thought he needed to study. He wrote each “spelling” word 3 to 5 times. This is done on the left side of the 2 page spread of the spiral notebook. On day 2, he studied it and let me know when he was ready and then we did dictation on the right side of the page. I used to not check for indenting the paragraph and so that has been our latest struggle for him to learn to do. I expect all correct spellings and punctuations.
Here has also been a good lesson in attentiveness and the rhythms and melodies of our language because I expect to read a part of the passage only one time and not have to repeat myself. Some days I end up repeating, but I tell him he should listen better and say it in his mind before going to write it. I tell him to listen for the music in the language and I read it normal and then again in a monotone computer voice so he can see there is a certain rhythm to our everyday language. It has taken months for him to get better at this and I try to break the phrase at a natural point and about 5 – 7 words at a time. I really found the value in this extra benefit to dictation when my mother was visiting and she did dictation for him. After several times, he began to say how much more he preferred grandma to do it with him. So I paid better attention to how she did it and she would give only about 3-4 words at a time and would repeat as many times as he wanted her to. I felt this was babying him and not helping him to grow in attentiveness. So now I am the only one who does the dictation with him. And I can see him growing in this area.
As recommended by missceegee, Christie, I held off on the BOM until 7th or 8th grade. We did start his own BOC, using the one he preferred, from Sonlight. I require one entry per week and he does not do anymore than that. The one from Sonlight I got was on Ebay and came with some “sticker” images for Ancients, so he used those most of the time. He is great at drawing and would sometimes draw an image and label it himself. I am hoping he will put more effort into it as he gets older.
For grammar, we ended up doing more Writing Tales and I have been happy with it. He seems to like the stories in it, too. He likes the games and does fine with the oral and written narrations in it. I plan to have him do their next book next year, but more of his own writting. Because this past year, I would write down his draft of the narration with creative touches and the next day he would do copywork with it. One lesson is two weeks and during that time, there is one oral narration, one written draft summary, one copywork passage, some grammar practive, dictionary, spelling practice based on words they misspelled in their written draft summary, and one final story where they can change parts of the story (creative touches), but keeping with the same storyline. Like instead of King Alfred, he used King Dad or instead of a fox, a dog is used. He had fun with that part. Near the end I found that his final was taking too long to write the copywork from what I wrote down from him the day before and we ended up using a timer for 15 minutes and then stopping.
We learned a lot using our timers this past spring. There is a thread on here about that. I ended up cutting over an hour from his day by using the timer. Math is timed at two 20 min. sessions now where it was taking over an hour at one session.
Most of the year until the last 8 weeks, he did 3 independent reading books per day. One in history (his favorite subject), one in science (we did the SCM living books on ocean animals from the grades 4-6 list and some other ocean books we have or Jeanne Bendick bio. on Ancient scientist), and one in one of the subjects of health (A Beka text), geography, or Business (Toothpaste Millionaire, Common Sense Business for Kids). He finished these books early so down to only history and science the last 8 weeks. I made a list of books to be read. So when one was finished, read the next one. I broke the list up into terms so it was not so overwhelming to see all the books for the year at once. This also helped me to see if we would be finishing all of the books or if I needed to make preferences for which ones to read. Here our timer helped again. Somedays he would finish school so late and part of the reason would be because he got caught up in the book and would read past the one or two chapters or whatever was assigned. He does well to set his timer for 20 minutes and then he can finish the chapter if he is close to the end of it, but he knows it is time to move on even if the story is in an exciting part.
For penmanship, and fluancy in writing, it seemed to me he took too long to write. So the last half of the year, I got him HWOT Can Do Cursive to practice some more and it also has some grammar and small writing assignments. I found that he was pressing too hard with his pencil. Changing to a wider, triangle pencil helped. But I plan to have him try an ink pen next year. And I started to require all written work to be done in cursive, except Spelling Wisdom, which he thought he could learn spelling better in print. I am starting to think that cursive first really is better.
I hope that helped. It is late and I feel I have just rambled on. It was nice to see you on here again. I think my dd is interested in writing your dd again.
