Elementary English

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At our homeschool group's curriculum share I ended up describing how I taught Sparkle to read. That discussion prompted me to record here what I did with Sparkle for language arts so that I can repeat the process with Glitter. Glitter has her own way of thinking, but at least this plan will give me a starting point.

The focus of this phase is learning to read and handwriting.
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I started by teaching Sparkle the letter names and sounds. This task is straightforward memorization, which requires repetition. I used videos: Letter Factory by LeapFrog and PocketSnails Letter Adventure. I stuck in a video as I was making supper. The Letter Factory is good letter names and sounds. However, it uses all capital letters, so I supplement with Pocket Snails Letter Adventure, which uses lower case letters. I also use LeapFrog's Word Factory and Code Word Caper sparingly. Word Factory helps with blending but relies on word families. Code Word Caper teaches more phonic concepts (long vowels and digraphs) but also has misleading information about the "two vowels."

I taught Sparkle how to blend sounds to make words. Blending is an oral skill, so it can be done completely orally without any paper or writing. I use songs (usually in the car) to teach blending. I borrowed the "diddle-diddle" song from my mother-in-law and use it to teach blending an initial consonant. I use the Apples and Bananas song to work on blending the vowel sounds. I also use The Name Game for additional rhyming / blending practice. I just start singing these songs in the car to pass the time and let the girls choose the consonants (diddle-diddle) or rhyming words (Name Game).

After Sparkle mastered the letter sounds and blending, I started a formal learn-to-read program. I used The Reading Lesson. We did from 1/2 a page to 4 pages depending on how difficult the page was. After she read to me, I read a book of her own choosing to her.

I did a few activities to get in extra reading practice. I wrote a new word on the chalkboard at night for her to see first thing in the morning. I made a deck of phonetic cards and we played command card with them. I paid her to read level-appropriate books that I chose. I strewed a lot of high interest easy readers from the library.

Once Sparkle finished The Reading Lesson, we did both reading and writing.

To build reading fluency, Sparkle had daily reading practice from a variety of sources. I also started doing repeated reading, where she would read the same book/passage/story two days in a row to build fluency.

After Sparkle was reading fluently, I dropped formal reading instruction and moved on to comprehension. I started her on the McCall-Harby reading comprehension book. When she finished that book, she moved on to the McCall-Crabbs reading comprehension book. At this point, she is "reading to learn" versus "learning to read."

Meanwhile, I started handwriting. I taught lower case letters first, and not in alphabetical order. I started with forming letters in a salt tray. I introduced one letter at a time and reviewed all previous letters. I used flashcards to keep track of the letters learned and for finger tracing practice.

After Sparkle could form all the letters, I switched her to lined paper and started spelling with SRW. I used sentence dictation as spelling practice, being sure to use only words that had been previously taught. Eventually I discovered that Sparkle is a natural speller, and I switched to Spelling Plus Dictation because it moves at a faster pace.

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Here we leave the record of what I did for language arts for Sparkle and hope to repeat with Glitter.
Next, I imagine what I'll do for English in the future with Sparkle. It is heavily influenced by what I've seen of Sparkle's learning style and my teaching style.

The focus of this phase is "learning to write", with an end goal of being able to "write to learn".
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Start teaching the four sentence types and eight parts of speech with The Sentence Family.

After finishing The Sentence Family, move on MCT LA Island Level. Start with Grammar Island. Weave in Music of the Hemispheres at will. Start Practice Island daily after Grammar Island is done, or earlier if Grammar Island takes a long time. Complete Music of the Hemispheres. Finally, do Building Langauge and Sentence Island.

After finishing MCTLA Island Level, do The Paragraph Book series and Grammar Town. After Grammar Town, do Killgallon's Story Grammar. Finally, return to the rest of MCTLA Town Level. Once Sparkle can write decent sentences and paragraphs, she will, hopefully, be ready to start writing across the curriculum.

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This sequence should take a few years and, for me, planning further out would be pointless.

I used to subscribe to a Charlotte Mason method for language arts with copywork, dictation, and narration. After playing with the idea in my head for a while, but never actually getting it done, I decided that Charlotte Mason language arts won't work for me.

I also experimented with creating my own curriculum, but after seeing how much work it is to come up with my own thing and how many great resources are out there, I'd rather spend the money. Most of my chosen resources are non-consumable, so I might be able to resell them.
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