Has anyone used these? Also, anyone do ILL in one year? I was thinking of lusing it with my 6th grader, eaving out dictation passages and some of the memory work and maybe pick and choose through the writing assignments so we are only doing about one a week. Is this doable? What about PLL? I haven’t been able to get as good a look at it online, but I figured if worse came to worse I could get my 3rd grader to do PLL over two years and ILL over two year.
We’ve been using ILL this year. My oldest is in fourth and we’ve been taking it really slowly. I think he’s up to lesson 50. There are over 300 lessons in the book!
I haven’t used the workbooks, but by looking at their web site they do ILL in three years (4th through 6th). They have PDF samples of the workbooks available to view.
By purchasing the workbook it also gives authorization for you to print it for as many of your children as you need, so I figure it’s a good investment!
Thanks for the workbook info – we will have three boys using the program next year and only have two copies of the book – this may work for all three!
4myboys, we’ve used ILL for three years with one son, and it was a good meaty program for those three years. I wouldn’t consider doing it in one year without major adjustment. Two other boys are currently finishing their second year with it, and will use it for 6th grade next year. My ds 9 has done PLL over this year and last, and will be starting ILL next year. You could take a look at PLL and start it wherever you felt it was most appropriate for your son – there’s no reason you have to do the whole book, but at the same time, there’s no reason you couldn’t do it for 3rd and fourth grade, and carry ILL through 7th grade. It’s a lovely book and my ds 14 was sad to say goodbye to it at the end of 6th grade!
Thanks, Evergreen. I think I would consider carrying over ILL into 7th for my oldest, covering it in 2 years probablly makes more sense. I’m still not sure whether to bother getting PLL for my younger, or just wait until the following year to do ILL for 4th – 6th. If I can get my hands on a copy of PLL I might have an easier time deciding. As far a basic grammar goes he’s pretty much got it down — noun, verb, adjectives, adverbs, subject, predicate, punctuation and capitalization. He’s an excellent reader and well about average speller, but his handwriting is average and we haven’t done any written narration yet. He’s just starting to be able to orally narrate a lesson decently.
PLL is so inexpensive, either the workbook or hard book version, that even if you just use it for a year, it’s still way cheaper than most options. It really doesn’t include spelled out lessons in the grammar things you mention, so he will have a head start in that, but gives exercises for useage. I like the way the lessons build in difficulty, and you can adjust within the lessons too, to make them right for where he is right now in terms of skills. It’ll include poetry, copywork, dictation, and oral narration. The dictation is usually longer than my younger boys can handle, so we either use part of it for dictation, or I assign it as copywork.
I love both PLL and ILL. Our 12YO son just started speaking English at 10 when we adopted him 2 years ago. I fully believe PLL helped him get such a jumpstart on spoken English. The short lessons were PERFECT for his abilities as an ELL student. I have my 4th grader using ILL, but we use it maybe twice a week and I intend to use it for 3 years with him.
I’m just curious, while on topic of PLL and ILL … do you all supplement with anything or do you simply use Serl for the bulk of your language arts? My oldest is a rising 3rd grader and we’ll be doing Part 2 of PLL, Spelling Wisdom, Pictures in Cursive, and Pathway Readers as our LA core. I wonder if others add to PLL? Or even to ILL?
I had planned on ILL, Spelling Wisdom, Write with the Best, cursive handwriting practice and reading book lists for various children. I finally have all books in hand to really peruse before scheduling, since that makes a difference sometimes. =)
Hi, I am Cynthia from IntermediateLanguageLessons.com. I just wanted to peek in and mention, especially for 4myboys, that Google now has Primary Language Lessons scanned. You can find it at this link. Google has such long links, so if it doesn’t work, just google it ‘primary language lessons google’ or go straight to google books.
For a rising 3rd grader, I would not do anything more than you have planned. I think that is plenty but it depends on the child I guess.
My rising 4th grader does like workbooks to a point, so I buy the cheap ones at Sam’s Club and let him do the language arts section as free work. I will go in and rip out a page here and there that I don’t really like the content or don’t see any benefit. We usually do ILL orally for the most part, though some lessons I have him write it out. Just depends but more often than not, he does these with me orally.
For handwriting this past year, I put together a cursive handwriting book for him that he loved and I loved. I was able to use the same one for my 12YO son (that I mentioned above) b/c it was a PDF I downloaded and the publisher gives each family rights to print as many times as you like for your family.
I printed ours in b/w and had the spiral binding done at fedex office. My 12YO and 9YO boys have loved using these this year. I am looking actually at another one from the same publisher as their cursive is looking better but more practice would not be bad either.
Thank you for the encouragment. I like the looks of that Cursive at Currclick; I’ll keep it in mind for my boys. I already have all of ours in hand from Queen so I’ll stick with what we have right now. My girls do seem to like the pretty paintings in the Queen penmanship books, too.