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Language Arts
We think about Language
Arts as including reading, writing, spelling, and
grammar.
Reading
Because both of our kids
like to read a lot, we don't need to do any remediative
work. Our daughter does use the
Wordly Wise series for
vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Because
they read all the time, we borrow heavily from our local
library (and through Interlibrary loan).
Our son likes non-fiction books like history and
science, puzzle books and trivia, and film and animation
(Classic Disney, Christopher Hart, Mark Kistler). He
also like some humorous fiction like Bunnicula, and
fantasy literature like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Our
daughter loves animal series books like Animal Ark,
almost all of the Freddie the Pig stories, Secrets of
Droon, and Harry Potter. She also likes reading
non-fiction books on animals, kids magazines -
especially animal ones, and loves to watch Jeff Corwin.
Because our kids can generally summarize and read
critically, we don't have to teaching reading
comprehension. We did need to encourage our daughter to
ask more about word meanings, when we found that she
made some mistakes with inferred meanings.
Our daughter did take a Northwestern CTD course Real
Life Mysteries this past year, and she got better at
abstracting essential details in order to build her
theory for some of the mysteries (they covered the
Lincoln assassination, Amelia Earhart, etc.).
Both kids also enjoyed reading through
Scholastic Book of Idioms
Writing
We did choose to have the
kids take online courses for writing because it required
them to write on a regular basis, learn from their peers
and an outside teacher, and critique the writing of
others. Our son took three parts of the Stanford EPGY
course - and these were an excellent experience, but a
lot of work. The classes (students and teachers) do seem
to vary quite a bit - some relaxed, some pressured,
although they do the same assignments and readings. The
EPGY courses allow students to talk online & students
are paired with E-pals and must critique each others'
work. Our son liked the classes well enough, but it was
a serious course and not as much fun as the courses at
Northwestern.
Both our son and daughter have taken classes through
Learning Links at Northwestern. They both took the
Hobbit course and loved it. The Real Life Mysteries
course was good in terms of content (readings,
questions), but not good in terms of teacher discussion
or student interaction. Northwestern does have some
problem with teacher turn-over and regularity. We got
into some trouble with teachers who couldn't get
connected, or didn't interact with the kids. One great
teacher there, Wendy Conklin, left - and took the
courses she designed to
Mentis Online. We plan to try this out next
fall. Our daughter particularly likes online courses to
chat and discuss writing online.
Our kids also took the CTD Writers Workshop, which had
its good points - but the discussion forum was a bit
chaotic (rambling students, students & teachers
disappearing into other virtual rooms to read), and we
couldn't really recommend it. Because one of our kids a
reluctant writer, we wanted a course during the school
year that required regular assignments - it did that,
but we were disappointed in the paucity of teacher
comments. In that regard, EPGY was much better.
In general, our objects for writing were to have the
kids master the general format for persuasive,
expository, and creative writing. We will probably be
trying the progynasmata (classical writing) next year
and our son is thinking about CTD's Logic and
Argumentation course. The
Progymnasmata is a
classical exercise of 14 steps - that provides a format
for mastering the techniques of writing.
Other writing resources they use:
Write Outloud,
dictionary.com, and
thesaurus.com.
Spelling and Grammar
Our son picks up his
spelling and grammar for the most part by reading. He
needs some help with shortening and combining sentences,
but doesn't need to study grammar on a regular basis.
Our daughter uses several workbooks (and she enjoys
these) - beside Wordly Wise, she's also been working her
way through
Target Spelling. The
latter has a good mixture of reading, writing, and
visual strategies.
A little grammar practice is always available through
Mad Libs, but our daughter has also benefited from
Checking Your Grammar,
and the Grammar and Sentences to Paragraphs workbooks
from
Singapore Math.
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