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What is your favorite grammar/ Language arts
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Suggestions in Ruth Beechick’s You Can Teach Your Child Successfully are easy to follow. So, are the simple suggestions from Charlotte Mason Help, which I’m liking better all the time.
I used IEW for my older kids during these grades with great success, but I’m finding we don’t need anything formal anymore for the younger ones. That said, our youngest loves Queen’s Language Lessons and Serl’s PLL. I can see her continuing with either, or both of those, IF she seemed to need it. Otherwise, she’ll just be writing narrations, etc. and we’ll go over any punctuation, grammar usage, spelling as needed based on her writing.
Grammar–I picked up Our Mother Tongue over the summer, but so far, we’ve just been covering grammar with our Latin lessons (prima latina). I’m hoping to incorporate more grammar into their dictation lessons. We’ve mainly focused on things like parts of speech, punctuation, sentence structure (complete sentence vs fragment, subject/predicate, contractions, compound words, etc.)
Writing–We are doing this informally. I am reading through The Writer’s Jungle and incorporating some of the Bravewriter Lifestyle activities: http://www.bravewriter.com/bwl We also use notebook pages for written narrations. We’ve also done activities from Write On: http://www.kid-friendly-homeschool-curriculum.com/Write-On.html
Spelling–Spelling Wisdom
My oldest really struggled with Grammar and I found Growing with Grammar to be very easy for her to use and understand. It takes me out of the equation unless she gets stuck which doesn’t really happen often since the instruction guide is written to the student! http://www.growingwithgrammar.com
I got Mother’s tongue for DS12 and found it was not enough, I use it for review after we cover one subject w/Grammar Key. We are also using Simply grammar for both him and DS10.
We had not done much grammar until this year and I feel like we have some catching up to do. Sounds like a lot but we do not spend that much time for each one.
Not using anything more than dictation for spelling since they have pretty good spelling.
Our Mother’s Tongue, Spelling Wisdom and Spelling Power. I have also heard good things about Daily Grams for grammar.
It isn’t CM – but we love Apologia’s “Jump In” writing.
The SCM resource “Hearing and Reading, Telling and Writing” taught me so much about Language Arts. I am pretty sure I could do Language Arts with just that book (if I was willing to invest my time in the planning). It helps a lot with dissecting curriculum and determining what has value and what is redundant.
Ok, I always wonder why people say good things about Daily Grams, especially if you’re a CM fan. Isn’t it quite anti-CM to be given a page full of mistakes and have to correct them? Don’t we want to avoid our kids “taking a picture” of misspelled words and other mistakes? Am I missing something about the program, or not understanding this concept?
Okay – I have to retract ‘daily grams’ now. I am so sorry! I haven’t used it, so I definitely shouldn’t have mentioned it!!
Please forgive me, fellow CM’ers….I spoke out of turn!
Well, folks who do not use CM methods like & reccomend Daily Grams as well as other materials. We just have to evaluate each suggestion in light of CM methods & what we know works for our children.
Jeaninpa, I wonder whether you are confusing Evan Moor’s Daily Paragraph Editing series and the Daily Grams series which is written by Wanda Phillips?
What you described sounds much more like Daily Paragraph Editing than Daily Grams. In Daily Paragraph Editing the student is presented with a paragraph full of errors which s/he has to find and correct. (I agree DPE isn’t CM in nature
)“Okay – I have to retract ‘daily grams’ now. I am so sorry! I haven’t used it, so I definitely shouldn’t have mentioned it!!
Please forgive me, fellow CM’ers….I spoke out of turn!”
Serving with Joy,
I didn’t mean to sound critical!! Lots of people DO recommend DG. So,many do, in fact, that I purchased it and I’m confused. Daily Grams doesn’t include spelling errors, but it does leave out punctuation and capitalization and students need to fix those errors. If I’m understanding the CM approach to LA, Daily Grams doesn’t seem to fit. Would you all consider that a correct assessment?
We are using Daily Grams this year. I’m not a CM purist but I wouldn’t classifiy Daily Grams as anti-CM. Perhaps it is better classified as not CM friendly. My daughter is halfway through the book (grade 6) and we have not encountered any “errors” that the child needs to fix. They do include un-punctutated and un-capitalized sentences that the student must punctuate and capitalize, but that is much different than having sentences with errors. I’m completely against that because the student now has a visual picture of the wrong way to do it which can be confusing.
JennyMN, the lack of punctuation and capitalization are the types of errors that CM suggests avoiding. That said, we’re using Jr. AG Mechanics and it is similar with editing needing to happen. No, it isn’t CM friendly, but it’s working for us.
I’ve just taught 7 kids with Analytical Grammar season one and 7 kids with Jr. Analytical Grammar. The kids weren’t crazy about it, but I liked it because of its direct and to the point nature. It’s a lot of diagramming (which I’ve moaned about previously), but it’s very effective and I plan to continue with it.
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