Language Arts Lessons

 We try to adhere to the simplicity of Charlotte Mason's idea about language arts which leans heavily on narration and on copywork. By using CM's method language arts can spill over into many subjects as reading and writing are the primary tools in education, however, we also have specific skill building lesson to keep these tools sharp and ready for use. Handwriting, reading practice, and phonics we do in the morning just after breakfast in our Three R's Rotation.

Handwriting: We are transitioning from print to cursive. After doing some cursive only last year and seeing the boys missing some fundamental things I thought this book would help them see the little bits more clearly as well as to review each letter individually. I also like the Proverbs so Print to Cursive Proverbs was a great fit for us. The boys copy the proverb in print one day and then copy the cursive letters one by one in context of the verse. They also practice other words using that letter. As one letter is introduce every other day they get a good chance to copy and read the letter in in all the positions, first, middle and at the end of a word.

Phonics: We are still using a phonics book, Phonics Pathways. Seems we use a different one each year. I have been puzzling over why the boys simply don't seem to assimilate and use the phonics they have learned. They still struggle to know when to when to use the silent e rule etc. But I am learning to be content with slow progress and they are getting better and better at reading each year. I take them through a 5 minute lesson every day and then as they are reading or doing other things highlight that lesson in their real life language usage. Hope this gets it more home. I often wonder if it just isn't something they care about or their minds don't need this information just now, so it keeps getting set aside. One day as we continue to add this knowledge to their icebergs of knowledge it may come to the surface.

Reading: I don't know why we did this but we are reading through five different books one each day of the week. The books are very similar in difficulty and content so it doesn't seem to break continuity of we read three pages from one book, set it aside until the next week and pick up the next book to read three pages from it. The boys are reading the passages out loud to me as I work in the kitchen. I do very little monitoring except to be close at hand to correct a lazy reading or to help them when they get stuck on a new or difficult word. Mostly I am letting them be alone with their book and learn to develop strategies for working out how to read new words using the rules or knowledge they already have, ON THEIR OWN. They are enjoying this. I let many mistakes go by but in the end they have been stopping themselves to make it right as they want to know what the books is saying. What will happen next? This is why I love to read, and it has motivated me to read harder and harder books so I can get the knowledge out of them or to know about the people in them or how the story will end. 

After each reading I get to hear from them what they story was about. This is narration. We also do narration from book I read aloud to them in other subjects like history or literature, but they do very good narrations from reading to themselves too. In the future they will be doing more and more of this as their reading ability increases.

These are the books the boys chose to read from, you can find them all at Yesterday's Classics or Amazon.com. ( From left to right: The Sandman His House Stories, Rollo At Work, Rollo at Play, The Sandman more farm Stories, The Sandman His Farm Stories.)

Grammar study/Poetry and spelling are three more language arts lesson we do during the week. CM does not suggest a grammar or spelling lesson per say but both of our books are CM friendly so they work well with a CM education. Three days a week we work through lesson in Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl which includes poetry memorization, picture studies with narration and dictation practice etc. I let the poetry lessons in this book take the place of a separate lesson on poetry just now as it meets our needs beautifully and simply.

Two days a week we also do a lesson from our Spelling Wisdom book. Spelling wisdom simply puts spelling words into a sentence which can be prepared by the student ahead of time for a dictation. By following the course Sonya has developed you will learn the basic spelling words but with an idea attached. Brilliant! and so much easier to remember than the old fashioned spelling list. We just began Spelling Wisdom this year so we are on book one. Also since the spelling wisdom gives the boys adequate dictation practice I skip the dictation exercises in Primary language lessons when they occur in the book.

Lastly under Language Arts is Literature, my favorite. Literature for us happens at the end of the day and I read aloud to the boys before bedtime. We don't narrate this lesson just enjoy the stories, so when I chose books for this lesson I keep that in mind. Here is our Literature list for this year:

Tales From Shakespeare by Charles Lamb

Ou Island Saints by Amy Steedman

The Lantern Bearer by Rosemary Sutcliff

Adam of The Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Traditional Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens

Rolf and the Viking Bow by Allen French

The Viking Adventure

Princess Adeline by Julie Sutter

Stories of Beowulf

Monk's Hood by Ellis Peters

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

Knight of the White Cross by GA Henty

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

Selections from: Anderson's Fairy Tales

Selections from: Grimm's Fairy Tales

The Lion of St. Mark by GA Henty

Selections from: One Hundred and One Read-Aloud Celtic Myths by Joan C. Verniero 

Men of Iron By Howard Pyle

Crispin: The Cross of Lead by AVI

The Wise Woman and other stories by George McDonald

The Grey Wolf and Other stories by George McDonald

and, if we have time this year we will read the following, otherwise they will have to wait until next year...

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Two Towers

Return of the King

Language arts is not the boys best subject but I am holding fast to Charlotte's advice regarding the reading lessons and resting in my own sort of contentment knowing giving them a secure foundation is more important than arriving at the finish line in a certain time frame.

"The teacher must be content to proceed slowly, securing the ground under her feet as she goes." from Volume one, page 204.

Week Twenty Two Wrap-Up

We hope you had a wonderful Valentines's Day! I made heart hand pies for the boys and we topped it of with coconut cream YUM! We are in the throws of preparing for our Spring Break that will last three months. We will be doing school partly on the road as we travel about seeing family and friends. When you' all take a break for summer we will be getting back to the books. So if the postings are sporadic form here on out that is why. Now about this week.

Bible: 2 Peter with Dad over breakfast.

Latin: We are into Chapter 8 in our Minimus text book. Only 4 chapters left for this year, then we do a few weeks of review of the whole year and we will be onto Secondus.

Copy work: Max is still working through the Aesop's copybook and should be finished this week, so I have begun to review cursive with the twins. We began writing in cursive due to the fact that they all needed help with the left to right orientation of our English language. Then we learned print, so for the remainder of this year they will be doing cursive practice using some copy work booklets from Westvon Publishing.

Zak chose to copy sayings from the civil war, Tj chose sayings about pets, and Max chose to work on sayings about the solar system.

Primary Language Lessons: The boys have been preparing for dictation all week. Two chose to locate hard words in each sentence and copy those each three times each, and Zak preferred to simply copy the whole passage. Then they switched and did the opposite and so after three days of reading, copying and looking at the passage they were given dictation of it and they all did well. They corrected their own mistakes with a red pencil.

Mathematics: This is the second time we have gone through the Everyday Number Stories and on this pass through the material the boys noted for themselves how much better they understand the math. Yeah!

Art: We read Drawing With Scissors, a short book report on Henry Matisse, last week and so this week have been doing some of that....drawing with scissors.

Music: The boys have been doing some music appreciation, filling in of booklets about Robert Schuman for our composer lap books and listening to his lovely music as they play quietly.

Insects: We just completed our reading of The Tale of Daddy Longlegs by Arthur Scott Bailey. Now the boys have chosen to read.....We will decide today.

Nature Notebook:

Geography: The Young Carthaginian by G. A. Henty

History of Ancient Rome: We are reading and narrating through The Story of the Romans the story by Gruber and enhanced by Christine Miller.  We are almost done making our myth pockets. This week we put together two, one for Pandora's Box and another for The Race for Atlanta.

Stories of Faith: We are listening to Ben Hur: A tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

Reading Practice: Elson Reader Book three

Bed time Read Aloud: The Secret Seven Adventure Collection by Eind Blyton

Cheers!

Week Twenty One Wrap Up

You may observe as you read more of this post that our schedule has shifted. Last week the boys had a go at rearranging the schedule for project day and as that went so nicely and I wanted to make a change to the existing schedule I let them have a go at that as well, in their free time. We went about it the same with with slips of paper with each lesson title on it and they each fashioned what they thought was the best of schedules. Then they each took turns explaining their schedule and answering questions we each had about it. Then since they were all so similar we talked about the benefits and draw backs of each one.
After that there was a little bit of rearranging of lessons and they glued down the pieces of paper to another and turned in their ideas to me.
I changed only one thing and asked that the reading lesson be at the end of the day and they all agreed my reason for it was a good one so it was established. They all wanted to get the work done before lunch and have the afternoon to be more laid back, so I was very happy with that. They decided to split up art and music so one day we have art before lunch and the next day we have music after lunch because we usually read or listen for those lessons. When we have a work type music lesson it gets put before lunch.My ideas was to put the work t the front of the day and all the reading aloud after lunch and to the end of the day. Cool thing was that the boys all wanted to do that too. However I took the risk of letting them come up with the idea on their own. Makes the transition easier when we all want it.

Now we have a new schedule which I think works so much better than our last one and it gives us a good new feeling right in the middle of the year which refreshes us all. The new schedule is as follows...

Bible: Finished reading through 1 Peter, Next week we are on to 2 Peter. (still over breakfast with Dad)

Latin: Making paper soldiers the templates are part of the Minimus teachers manual. Most of the week was spent learning to read the dialogue in Ch. 7 called Do As You Are Told!

Aesop Copy Work: Max has just a few more pages to go before he finishes up his Aesop's copywork book, Zak and TJ are both done and enjoying some free time as a result of their hard work.

Language Arts: From Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl we practiced how to write letters. We even made our own envelopes and stationary pages.

And we had a conversation about what various animals and plants do to prepare for winter. We focus mostly in this lesson on answering orally in complete sentences.

Then the next day we did a picture study lesson and used the discussion about it as a basis for writing a story using the picture as a prompt. Below is Zak's picture and story. The picture is from Living books curriculum Primary Language lessons Workbook which we use oft and on for these language arts lessons. However I was just at their site and found it not there. Cynce's Place has also made a lovely workbook too and at a better price. It can be found here.

Math: Every Day Number Stories by Emma Serl and once a week we do The Matrix.

Art: This week we finished up our Ode the Matisse Mural... YEAH!!!! and we read Matisse Drawing With Scissors

Lunch

After lunch we read the following. Subjects with and astrix * were narrated.

Music: Robert Schumann And Mascot Ziff by Opal Wheeler

Science The Study of Insects: The Tale of Daddy Long Legs by Arthur Scott Bailey*

Geography: Our Little Carthaginian Cousin From Long Ago

Ancient Greece History: D'Auliers Book of Greek Myths*

Stories of Faith: Martyrs of the Catacombs Audio (this links to a free copy)

Reading Practice: Elson Reader Book Three. When they are through with this TJ wants to read Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff, Zak wants to read Twice Freed and Max wants to read Elson reader book four.

Piano Lesson with Dad

Bed Time Read Aloud: The Secret Seven Adventure Collection by Enid Blyton

Hope you have a good week!

Week Twenty Wrap-Up

Project Day, how it came about. This is something we started new this year, it is a way to have time for projects or lessons that take more than 20-30 min. to accomplish. Last year, I noticed that in many subjects the lessons the boys would benefit most from would involve lessons that took time. Lessons that gave them the space to think, create and then execute. I was very inspired by the bloggers Kim, Sara, and Tracy over at four& twenty and how they made this extra space in  their school days for creativity. After ruminating on the ideas from their blog posts I bought Kim's book Habits of Being. Inspired more I also bought one of their literature guides for Douglas Florian's books of poems. I came up with the idea of adding a day to our 5 day school week to practice doing this type of lesson. So our sixth day of the week has been project day ever since. Recently I found this fun book called Project Based Education which I have only just begun to read through, but so far I have found it useful to provide many very practical ideas of how to implement projects in any style of homeschool of classroom setting you have. I like this idea for I think structure is important for creativity and it is often misunderstood that creativity needs no limits however the limits appropriately set will allow a young creative person to really soar. It also prepares students to develop more skills towards a self education; meaning the child does the work of learning. On our project days I am handing to them little by little the reins of structures and let them make more decisions and have more time to follow them through.

This week we spent a good twenty minutes developing the schedule for the day. I gave them the subjects, some of which they had already helped me decide on, written on strips of green paper. I described what each lesson entailed so they could see how long or short each one was. They each were given a turn to arrange the subjects how they thought the day would go best, and in an orderly fashion the other two gave feedback. Responding in an "orderly" fashion was the difficult part of the exercise. (smile) In this way we talked through the benefits and disadvantages of each schedule. I was pleased to see they were already in a habit to arrange the work so that the hard work would be done first and then the easier lessons would follow. They also already knew it was best to stagger the work with hard lesson next to easy lessons so that they did not tire before the work was done. All in all it was a good exercise for them to think it all through. Here is the schedule they came up with and followed.

In the end the day went much smoother and quicker because the boys had a mental picture of how it would go, they had a say in the plan, and they owned it. The ownership aspect for them is very motivating, and I have seen them thrive knowing they have this amount of control over their education. As they grow and use it wisely they will be given more.

Bible: We are continuing our reading from 1st Peter over breakfast.

Stories of Faith: Martyrs of the Catacombs: A Tale of Ancient Rome Audio book.

Mathematics: Everyday Number Stories by Emma Serl.

Aesop Copy Work:

Ancient Greek History: D'Aulier's Book of Greek Myths

Greek Myth Literature Pockests by Evan Moor

Stickers from DK The Ultimate Greece & Rome Sticker Book

We added Mt. Olympus (the home of the gods) to our map.

Science the Study of Insects: The Tale of Kiddie Katydid by Arthur Scott Bailey

Nature Notebook:

Ha ha, Max drew his own thumb!

Geography: Our Little Roman Cousin from Long Ago

Language Arts: We completed our dictation exercise (PLL Lesson #47) and next week we will learning how to write letter. Looks like fun!

Reading Practice: Elson Reader Book Three. As we are getting closer to the end of this reader my mind began to think about what would be next. Although we do own book four it seemed like perhaps the boys would like to pick out a real book of their own to read. I proposed this idea to them and they were very enthusiastic! yeah! So soon the boys will get to have their pick. I am so curious what they will chose. I will put a bottom limit on their choice, nothing easier than this for example but I'll let them shoot as high as they want to. TJ already has a keen interest in Rosemary Sutcliff's book Outcast because he loves the character Beric so much. He is willing to read a page a day until he finishes it. We'll see what the other two decide.

Bedtime Read Aloud: Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

Latin: Chapter 7 of Minimus we are working on reading and translating the dialogue entitled "Do as You're Told!" our grammar points this chapter include the command form of verbs.

Art: Ode to Matisse Mural still in progress.

Music: We have been enjoying Opal Wheeler's book about Robert Schuman.

I hope your week was as delightful as was ours!

Week Nineteen Wrap-Up

Bible: We have begun reading from 1 Peter with our breakfast.

Stories of Faith: Polycarp: The Crown of Fire by William Chad Newson. If you haven't noticed we are slowly transitioning into our study of Rome, and stories of faith abound during this historical period so we will be using many Rome based books the rest of this year.

Mathematics: Everyday Number Stories can be a little deceptive when you first begin it. It starts out very simple and gets challenging quickly asking the students learn and then use the information presented in each lesson. TJ and Zak came to this frustrating point last week. They have had lessons before this week explaining about the concept of 2 pints making 1 quart and 4 pecks making a bushel and 3 feet equally 1 yard. They have had lessons working out problems asking them to figure how many feet are in 5 yards and what is 1/4 of a bushel etc. but they have failed to really learn these well for when the problems became more complicated 5 qt. - 3 pints =         they were lost. They had been focusing on getting the problems done, but not on understanding what it was all meaning. SO we have slowed down, worked on problems slowly step by step, often visually and with manipulative until I could see the light bulb in their little minds turn on.

We continue with our reading about Albert Einstein from Kathleen Krull's lovely book.

Aesop's Copy work:

Ancient Greek History: D'aulier's book of Greek Myths and greek myth pockets by Evan Moor.

Science, The Study of Insects: We have moved on to reading about insects this week leaving the reading about birds behind, but not the learning, for the boys are now more aware of birds, their habits and their features and they have an affinity for them. Their investigation of birds and the self education of them will continue for as long as they are living. The book we began with our look into insects is by Arthur Scott Bailey entitled The Tale of Kiddie Katydid. After reading a few chapters we got curious as to what a katydid looks like so we looked it up in our field guide.

Last summer we read Children of the Summer and Fabre's Insects, also great living books on this subject.

Nature Notebook: We missed doing this this week. :( I was not feeling well, so we ended up having to postpone until next week.

Geography: Our Little Roman Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles

Language Arts: The boys have completed the small unit study we did with the poems in On the Wing by Douglas Florian. This week we wrote a poem beginning with an emotion, then using the information we know about birds to describe it. Then the boys painted a picture to go along with the poem.

Hungry, 

is like a hawk who has a wife and children to think about. 

He catches a mouse because he has a wife. 

But now they all have a mouse to eat.

Zak

Patient, 

is like a humming bird that hovers and waits for the nectar to come out. 

He takes out the nectar because it's dinner. 

But now he feeds his babies.

TJ

Impatient,

 is like a roadrunner who is waiting for a dinner.

He catches a snake because his children are hungry.

But now his babies eat.

Max

Then we began a dictation for the short story The Dog In the Manger by Aesop found in PLL . This is the method for doing dictation that we used, and here Sonya from Simply Charlotte Mason explains dictation via youtube.

Bed time read aloud: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

Reading Practice: I am so pleased with the boys this week as they have done such a wonderful job reading aloud to me from the Elson Reader. We have been reading out of book three and are very close to finishing it. They have made great progress this year. Looking back I would say that reading aloud was their least mastered subject, but this year they are reading with better strategies for unknown words, reading with more fluency, and reading more as to these two factors are becoming easier for them. TJ especially who struggled so much at the beginning of this year is reading well, and reading a lot. He is soaring past his brothers. Yesterday he read for me 6 pages of his own initiative. (I assign 2 pages) Zak has taken to reading from his Bible before bed time and when he has free time. Often he comes to me and reads me a chapter from Genesis. He is so proud! It is great to see them succeeding!

Latin: We are now in Chapter 7 of Minimus and I decided to order Secondus for us next year before we begin the Visual Latin course with Duane. They have done so well with this course and the twins will only be eight years old next year so I think we will have better success if we do not rush on until the boys are ready for the level of detail Latin demands.

We have been practicing to read the new dialogue and understand the command form of latin words. They also used little sticky labels to label their armor and weapons they made last week with the latin words for each.

Art: Still working on our 24 page mural the bummer....our pens are drying up. :( this is what we have accomplished thus far...

Music: This week we began looking at Robert Schumann by starting to read Robert Schumann and Mascot Ziff by Opal Wheeler.

Hope you week was a good one!

Week Eighteen Wrap-Up

Do you feel a slump? These past few weeks we have been feeling a bit tired of the schedule, the routine feels a bit dry. I sense it in the boys and for myself I have had my mind elsewhere on other things and so have they. We did not take a break at Christmas for more than a few days and we talk a lot about our up coming trip in March, so it would seem we have early spring fever. It could be time to dig in and push or step back for a rest....after praying I sensed rest was what we needed. So, last week we took a few days off to work on projects, both for myself and for them. This helped a whole lot just to get out from under the mental pile of things that builds up.  It was rejuvenating to have some free time to just to get those undine things done. The boys played outside and were rosy with sunshine, drew pictures form Ed Emberley's Make a World book,  and then it we were better able to return to the schedule again. I was too!






















Bible: We are wrapping up our reading of the book of Revelations soon and the boys have chosen 1st and 2nd Peter to read next.

Stories of Faith: We completed our reading of Twice Freed and have begun Polycarp Crown of Fire (torch bears series).

Mathematics: Our new rota is working well! The boys are able to do the math pages five days out of the week, two pages a day, from Everyday Number Stories by themselves which is wonderful. Then on project day, they do the Matrix. TJ improved his time and accuracy on the Matrix as well. Yeah TJ!

Aesop Copy Work: Zak has been working furiously all this year to get this book DONE! Yes he is a finisher and most motivated to just get it done. And he has done it! So, he gets a break during this period of the day to play quietly while his brother work on their handwriting and coloring. We have talked about doing cursive next...I can't wait. We did a little cursive when they first learned to write to get the left to right order ingrained and now we will head back to it.

Ancient Greek History: We have read through all of the Heroes by Charles Kingsley and have begun to read and narrate through D'Auliers book of Greek Myths. This is a good one for the boys to narrate from as the excerpts are short and descriptive. I did not have them narrate the Heroes for the reason that the stories were long, full of difficult names and hard to know how to break it up into smaller meaningful chunks for them. Instead I had them narrate from another book we read right after lunch, Three Greek Children, and that worked out much better.

The Study of Birds: We are now reading The Adventures of Mr. Mocker by Thornton Burgess.

Nature Notebook:

What the boys found in the yard this week...

Geography: We have been reading Peeps at Many Lands Ancient Greece by James Baikie.

Language Arts: We are taking a short break from the lessons in Primary Language Lessons to do a unit study on a poetry book by Douglas Florian, it is called On the Wing. I am using a poetry guide from blackbird&company to guide us along. Thus far we have read laughed through all of the poems and paintings. Wonderful! and we have learned about some interesting descriptive words he uses: CRIMSON, HUDDLE, MIMIC, HUE, and HOVER. The boys have really picked up on the word crimson and shriek with excitement whenever they hear it. Fun!

We also drew one of the birds from the book and wrote a few sentences about it in our composition notebooks (bought at Walmart).The assignment was to write something about the bird they chose.  I find it helps them to require a certain number of sentences like four or three.

Max's Poem

 I hum, I glum, I do not scum.

I twirl, I whirl, I am a girl.

I eat nectar with my scepter.

I am not a woodpecker, I do not drum.

TJ wrote:

The hawk has sharp eyes.

He uses binoculars.

The hawk has sharp claws to tear his prey.

Rabbits are scared of him.

Douglas Florian has also written these books (the blackbird&company guide has lesson with all the books below. I hope to do them all):

In the Swim
Lizards, Frogs, and Polliwogs
Mammalabilia
Insectlopedia

Reading practice: Two pages each day out of Elson Reader Book three.

Bed Time Read Aloud: Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

Latin: Minimus Chapter 7 latin words for weapons, and we made small replicas of armor and weapons for our wooden man. (bought at IKEA)

Art: We have begun a 24 page mural from Artprojectsforkids.com. It is called the Ode to Matisse. The boys are very enthusiastic about it so I am confident we will finish. While they color we listen to Chopin. To begin the mural we first did a coloring page of the entire mural.

Music: We are wrapped up our look and listen to Fredrick Chopin this week. To finalize the study we added him to our composer lapbook, timeline and did a music appreciation page.

Max's music appreciation sheet and inside of the lapbook.

Hope you have a great week!