English

This subject is one that I pull from alot of different resources. One of my greatest mistakes when approaching English,at the beginning,  was trying to teach reading before I taught phonics. And before you can teach phonics your child really needs to be able to recognize their letters, which is where I made my second mistake!! Please read carefully!!!!! You should teach your children lower case letters first!!!!! My logic behind this is that they will be able to recognize more letters in a book since most of the letters in a sentence are written in lower case !!!!!

So it would be safe to say that a prerequisite for English would be Phonics and Reading. And here is what I have used and will be using with CJ (4 yo) and/or JJ (7yo) this year:

The Letter Factory DVD
Bob Books (all my children have used these books to become confident at sounding out words)
Happy Phonics (A great program that uses phonic games to help build a solid phonics foundation)
KidsSoup ( You have to pay for a membership but it has alot of Letter specific activities to do with your child. What I like is you can save the worksheets to your computer so when your membership expires you still have access to them. I made CJ a booklet with 4 different worksheets for each letter.)
Reading Eggs (Another website you have to pay for but well worth every penny. It is what helped JJ realize he could read. It goes from pre reading to around a 2nd grade reading level. The also give you a 2 week free trial but beware, you children will beg to keep playing!!!)

Now once your child is reading you need to consider readers. Sonlight has readers as well as Learning Language Arts Through Literature Red Book. The easiest definition of a reader is any book your child can read independently, make more sense now?

Some book series we have used in the past are

Dinosaur Cove
Bob Books
Dick and Jane
39 Clues
The Magic Tree House
Dr. Seuss books

Then comes spelling and handwriting. Both of which LLATL covers but I chose to skip those parts of the lessons, again because of my teaching philosophy. I felt that if a child was exposed to the correct spelling of words through ALOT of reading and had a great phonics foundation that spelling lessons was just busy work. I decided to teach my children italic so I started off with these Italic books but once I ordered the StartWrite program, I used that program to make worksheets out of the Bible verses my children were learning weekly. Because LJ wanted to learn cursive this year, I was thankful that the LLATL Yellow Book introduced that in their lessons so I just used their weekly lessons and made italic worksheets off of what they did. (Does that make sense?)

So for the actually English lessons I will be using LLATL's  Red Book and Orange Book. I usually skip the Blue book because its alot of phonic and handwriting and I already have that covered. I did forget to mention that LLATL has dictation but I skipped that part because I just felt like LJ wasn't ready for it. If the orange book has it I will start him on that this year as well.

One more thing I will be ordering for LJ is Common Sense Press' WordSmith Apprentice. It looks like its going to be fun and will greatly engage LJ, I'll let you know next year!!!!

As you can tell I take what I like from a curriculum and leave the rest behind. But honestly I haven't done much research concerning Language Arts so I am looking forward to seeing what other homeschoolers are using this year over on Heart of the Matter's Not Back to School Blog Hop!!!



So far I have reviewed our History/Geography, Math, and English, tomorrow I will be reviewing what we use for Bible Study. And as always, if you leave a comment I promise to come on over and say hello!!!