My Picks for Language Arts Curriculum
When choosing language arts curriculum for your homeschool, it’s important to consider what your goals are, what your strengths are, and whether to choose an all-in-one program or pick different books to meet different needs. My primary goal in Kindergarten is to get my kids reading, though some of my kids were reading Tolkien by the end of the year, and the rest of my kids didn’t click with chapter books until the second half of first grade. Regardless of what my kids pursue in college and career, we believe that it’s very important for them to be good communicators, so we really emphasize proper grammar, logical thinking, and active listening. My kids move at different paces, so I work through language arts subjects with each of them at their own pace. Because I am homeschooling four children and have a special needs toddler, I like curriculum that is scripted, so I literally grab the teacher guide and start reading the lesson, with no extra prep required on my part.
There are, of course, many, many great options out there. We mostly use the curriculum put out by Well-Trained Mind Press. I appreciate that they are clear and straightforward, literature-rich (seriously, my girls were just sitting at the table talking about all the great books we’ve read because of the snippets in Writing With Ease), and all open-and-go for me as the teacher. Note that I don’t include any reading comprehension curriculum here. I don’t believe in it. My husband and I were English literature majors in college, I taught high school literature, and we own thousands of books. Reading comprehension is important to us, but it doesn’t need to happen with a workbook or program. Read good books with your kids, and discuss them when you’re driving, at the end of the chapter, when you’re out on field trips, and at the dinner table. (All technology and TV talk is banned from our table.) Become friends with other families of readers, and discuss favorites with the adults, encouraging the kids to discuss their favorites together. When your kids get inspired by a book they’ve read and want to set up a campsite in the middle of the living room, let them make the mess (and keep it up for a day or two). Give books as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, and any special occasion. Talk to your kids about why you love the books you’ve given them. If reading great literature permeates your family culture, you won’t need to have your child complete a reading guide at the end of every book she reads. I can’t think of anything more likely to kill a love of literature than having to fill out a worksheet. Off my soapbox, and on to solid choices to consider:
Phonics: The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. I love this program, which I have used to teach all four of my big kids to read, because it’s well-scripted for me as the teacher, it builds logically and explains phonics principles in a way the kid can grasp, and there aren’t any distracting pictures that have my kid guessing the word instead of sounding it out. We usually work through it in Kindergarten and 1st grade.
Language and Grammar: First Language Lessons from 1st-4th grade and then Grammar for the Well-Trained Mind from 5th-8th grade. This program is deceptively easy but builds on itself really successfully. Grammar is a passion of mine, and I love how all of my kids can rattle off definitions of the parts of speech and lists of common prepositions and such. The poetry memorization selections are excellent, too! Starting in 3rd and 4th grade, we begin to diagram, and I find that my kids’ speech and written work is better when we can identify the function of every word in the sentence. Best of all, it is heavily oral in the early years and completely scripted for the parent, in case it’s been a while since you thought about the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
Writing: Writing With Ease. Susan Wise Bauer takes a very different approach to teaching writing than your average public school textbook. Instead of telling kids who are still learning to spell, form letters, and organize thoughts to write long, dull assignments, she breaks the writing process into discrete steps and provides plenty of practice in each one. It may seem too simple to have your 1st grader’s full assignment for the day be to just copy one sentence perfectly, but it truly pays off. Quality over quantity is the goal in the early years, and I love it. Plus there are so many wonderful books that we (re-)discovered as we worked our way through the program. Then we switch to Writing and Rhetoric. While I love Writing With Ease, Susan Wise Bauer herself recommends that many students may want to take a break after the third year and strengthen their skills with a different program before starting her Writing With Skill program. We break in 4th and 5th grade and work our way through Fable, Narrative I and II, and Chreia. So far, my kids have enjoyed having a slightly different way to practice their copywork, narration, dictation, summary, and amplification, though we’ve ended up moving into writing classes with a teacher other than mom starting in 6th grade, so we haven’t gone further in this program.
Spelling: All About Spelling. We use this spelling program because a friend with six kids had tried several and told me this was the best. We don’t start spelling until after we finish phonics, because they’re both kind of taking the same subject from opposite ends. The program as written involves magnetic letter and syllable tiles, and my kids largely find those annoying, so we adapt the written instructions and use our dry erase markers and white boards, instead.
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