Curriculum Review: English

English is such a broad topic. Reading, spelling, writing, grammar, speeches, and literature all forms parts of the subject. Rather than look at what we did each year with Merry I thought we could look at each aspect and when we included that as part of her studies since there was a lot of overlapping.

Her first curriculum, for any subject was “Now I’m Reading.” The series is by Nora Gaydos and I highly recommend it for teaching reading. It starts with pre-readers and goes up in steps. The last page of each book is for after the book is read, it contains reading comprehension questions and sometimes sentence forming activities.  Merry used those in preschool through kindergarten.

Once Merry had a good grasp on sounding out words, we started using All About Spelling. The curriculum’s main draw was letter tiles. Being able to put the letters together 

And trade tiles out rather than having to erase was a positive for us. Mistakes felt less permanent and were less discouraging.  Because of that we continued to use AAS all the way though to level 7 in sixth grade. 

Once Merry had mastered reading, we started reading comprehension. Using the Daily Reading Comprehension workbooks by Evan Moor. We used those from first grade through fourth grade.

Along with reading comprehension, we also started focusing on grammar and writing in first grade. Through third grade we used a free printable workbook published by McGraw-Hill. The workbook was perfect for us, it had four days of grammar lessons followed by a short writing assignment for each Friday. Unfortunately, it was apparently not meant to be free. When I went to get the fourth grade version the site required a school log in code. And the workbook was not sold as a standalone product.

So when Merry was in fourth grade we started searching for a writing/grammar curriculum that would work for us.  The first one we tried was Writing Strands. But that was not a good fit for us. After two years we gave up and in sixth grade we did a year without writing.

Sixth grade was fun because instead of the writing program I made my own literature study. This was the first formal literature class that Merry did. Until this point I had simply let her read whatever interested her from the library and did my childhood favorites as family read out louds. I relied heavily on internet resources, especially teacher-pay-teachers to find guides and activities.  We used fairy tales to talk about plot, characters, and other story elements. We had a poetry unit on the different types of poems. And we did a unit on mythology, particularly that of Greeks and Romans.

In seventh grade, Merry decided to do “Cover Story,” a curriculum that walks you though making your own magazine over the course of the year. It was a good opportunity for me to see where she excelled in writing and where we needed to reinforce ideas. 

The area that needed reinforcing was grammar, so in eighth grade we went through the Life of Fred Language Arts books. As fans of the math books, these were great. They were definitely used more to reinforce rather than teach. And we will probably use them for review later in high school.

Seventh grade was when I started looking for a literature program that would work for Merry. I struggled with the reading lists in some programs or the lack of grading help in others. Then I found Lightning Literature. The middle school curriculum (which we used in seventh and eighth grade) contains the books to read, a student guide with comprehension questions and writing prompts, a student activity book with puzzles and word searches, and the teacher’s guide. The best part was the teacher’s guide made sense to me. The curriculum was a perfect fit! 

At the high school level Lightning Literature is a little more intense. But the grading guides make it easy to explain what is expected. For ninth grade we used the Speeches class. In addition to the reading and writing aspects of the class, Merry had to give 4 speeches during the year.

The Lightning Literature classes have essay writing as a part of them but I wanted to give Merry a well rounded writing foundation. So we also used Write Shop level 1 for ninth grade writing. Instead of the response focus of essays, Write Shop focuses more on the creative choices. Things like word choices, description, and sentence structures.

So that’s how we got to where we are. This next year Merry is planning to continue writing with Write Shop 2 and will be taking American Literature using Lightning Literature.