Year in Review: Language Arts

Language Arts was K's favorite class this year. Her teacher was absolutely fantastic and made everything fun, plus there was a lot of reading :-)

The core workbooks were: Abeka Language 3, Just Write 2, and Reading-Thinking Skills C and D.

Abeka was fine - it's a thorough course in grammar and writing conventions with a lot of opportunities for practice. It is tiresome if you do every exercise, though. And of course, it has decidedly Christian content.

The Just Write series is really good - I would really recommend all the books in that series. Book 2 goes through the writing process step by step. There are pages for brainstorming, adding descriptive phrases, writing dialog, forming coherent paragraphs, etc. I think it is really useful and plan to complete what's left of the book this summer. The teacher supplemented the writing instruction in this book with techniques from the Institute for Excellence in Writing. I think that is probably the best writing program out there, but it takes some time to train yourself to use it.

The Reading-Thinking Skills books were also great. They cover things like vocabulary, analogies, inference, transition words, etc. They are fun little exercises, and the readings were on interesting topics. K's favorite was a story about a message in a bottle that had to be put into a logical order. The analogies helped K get ready to take the SCAT for the CTY Talent Search :-)

They covered a lot of literature in this class, also. I put all the books on our Amazon page. K liked all of the selections. They began the year with Aesop's Fables and traditional Fairy Tales, and did fun activities out of the Evan-Moor literature pockets for each. (Love those Evan-Moor Pockets!!!)

The King's Equal was the first novel they covered. It is short and easy to read, but full of literary elements and quite a charming story. The teacher introduced literary analysis with this one, because it was fairly easy to spot. She used techniques from Teaching the Classics, another resource I like a lot. I've seen this guy at homeschool conventions and he is a great speaker - he always ends with a group analysis of a picture book. I saw him do A Bargain for Frances and was entranced.

Of all the books K read with the class this year, Mr. Popper's Penguins was her favorite. She would laugh out loud while reading, and often re-read chapters because they were too good to read only once :-)

K had already read Charlotte's Web, but didn't mind reading it again. We watched the new movie when it came out on DVD, too. K loved the movie, but I didn't think Julia Roberts made a very good Charlotte.


Homer Price was a fun book. It had some hilarious moments involving doughnuts, and K got a kick out of the old-fashioned slang.

Mariposa mentioned finding Rabbit Hill and noticed the interesting vocabulary. YES, it is full of unusual words- a great vocabulary builder, if it doesn't interfere with comprehension or enjoyment. K liked it, as she always loves stories with personified animals, and can read around most vocabulary. But one of her friends, N (also quite bright and an avid reader) just couldn't get through this book. N got stuck at every new word and couldn't get the main idea without looking up each word. She lost the flow of the story that way, and really didn't enjoy it at all. So I recommend that book with caution.

This teacher also read aloud in class each week. In the fall she read The Railway Children, and apparently she and all the children were crying at the end - they were really absorbed in the story! K is begging me to buy this book for her so she can have it forever. In the spring, they began Five Little Peppers. On the last day of school, she let the children choose what they would like to do, and they voted to hear as much of this book as possible in the 70 minute time slot! They still didn't finish, though, so K is again begging me to buy this one for her so she can finish and keep it forever :-)

Lastly, the kids read and sometimes memorized many great poems throughout the year, including:
Night and Day by Robert Louis Stevenson
Mr. Nobody, Author Unknown
Eletelephony by Laura Richards
Wynken, Blynken and Nod by Eugene Field
Every Time I Climb a Tree by David McCord
Calendar by Sara Coleridge
Thanksgiving Day by L. Maria Child
The Land of Story-Books by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe

I'm not s huge fan of poetry, but I thought these were all lovely selections, and K had a lot of fun with them. Sometimes they invented hand movements to go with the verses and got really creative.