Homeschool Friday: English {School Subject Indepth Series}

Sorry this post is so late! I intended to write it this morning, but, well, I got busy. Anyway, this week is going to kick off a series of Homeschool Friday posts that will go indepth on a particular school subject. I'll talk about all the curriculum we've used through the years for that subject (at least everything I remember), and I'll talk a little about how I feel about the subject.

This week we're going to kick it off with English! I'm going to try to fit all Language Arts type stuff in here, so that might take more then one post. We'll see. To make it a little easier to navigate, I'm going to divide it into individual topics (spelling, grammar, reading, and writing), and cover one at a time. Hopefully I can fit it all into one post, but if not, I'll cover the rest next week.

Spelling

When we first starting homeschooling, we used Spelling Workout, which is what Susan Wise Bower recommended.The link will take you to the first book in the series, which I believe is the first half of first grade. While it worked fine, I don't feel like I learned a whole lot with it. It focused a lot on wrote memorization, which has never worked well for me. Both my sister (who is going into 6th grade) and I used it through part way through 4th grade.

At that point, we both switched to Megawords, which is absolutely amazing. Each day, there is a page to do in the workbook. It is always a game, or dictation, or some kind of copy work, but all based on phoenetics. The thing that I think is really great about it is that there were never weekly spelling lists to memorize. Each chapter took as long as it took (often several weeks, and at the end was a spelling test. Each chapter focused on one phonetic rule (i before e, or suffixes for example, and had a list of 30-60 words. After I finished the whole chapter, my mom would pick out 20 words to test me on. With this method, the test is about how well you know the rule, NOT how good you are at memorization.

Grammar

I started out in 2nd grade by doing First Language Lessons .  I think it really helped build my foundation in grammar.

From 3rd grade through 8th grade, I did Growing With Grammar. Honestly, I can not say enough good things about this program. It is done completely independently. The student textbook provides a brief, compact description of the lesson topic, with several examples. The student would read this, and then do the designated two pages in the student workbook. The first page is always new material from that lesson, and the second page is review from previous lessons. Another great thing is that this book teaches outlining every year. This program was perfect for me, and I absolutely loved it. I highly recommend it.

Reading

I have never really done much of a formal reading curriculum. My mom regularly assigned me books to read and do book reviews on when I was in elementary school, but for the most part, all the school reading I have done has been part of history, particularly the last few years. 

That's it for today. Writing is going to be a somewhat long section, so I'm going to save it for next week, along with some of my thoughts on English as a subject.

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