If I could describe a day in the life of Satori lately, half of her waking hours would be spent writing! She started the day writing a story in an entire 28-page Bare Book. She then wrote in her new Animal Journal. In the afternoon, she gave me a few letters. And so on… I’m very proud of her to do all this, but it also overwhelms me. Should I be concentrating on giving her the skills to write better? In particular, all this makes me want to go faster in spelling so she spells her words correctly… go faster in grammar so she knows how to write proper sentences… go faster in writing so she knows how to organize her thoughts… My perfectionist tendencies are making me very anxious about all this, I feel like I’m going too slow for her in certain subjects.
But she’s only five, so I should just relax, right?
We follow the Well-Trained Mind philosophy closely, and they discourage creative writing until 5th grade I think. We are using their curriculum on both 1st grade writing and grammar and these are very gentle and appropriate for this age. But I’m wondering if they are too slow for our situation, with a very eager little writer. I rarely talk about these new programs we started using this year on this blog, but I’ll go over them now.
FIRST LANGUAGE LESSONS
For grammar, we are using First Language Lessons (I refer to this as FLL). This was easy enough to start a year ago, but you’re supposed to start when the child is reading at a certain level, so we stopped and then officially started again this spring in January 2010. We do it a few times a week and all spring we only covered nouns. Only this week did we start pronouns! We also covered several poems, which Satori memorizes very fast. I think it goes very slow and has lots of repetition, so I’m wondering if we could use a different curriculum. Or perhaps just go at a faster pace? As of this month we are going to do FLL 3-4 times a week instead of just twice a week, we’ll see how that goes. Below is the lesson we did today, we are on Lesson 50. The book we have covers both Year 1 and 2, and there are books that cover Year 3 and 4.
This is the only grammar program with which we have experience, so I am not sure how I feel about FLL. I’ll try it throughout the summer and hope it picks up. We are not doing any of the copywork it has in the book, as we do enough of that in other subjects. However, today, Satori wrote down the pronouns we’ve learned so far on her own accord.
Although I’m not 110% gung-ho on First Language Lessons, it is doing the job and it is one of the easiest things I teach her (as is anything by the WTM team). It also is nice as it covers things such as days of the week, months, poem memorization, and more. If it sounds appealing to you and you want to use this program, a new version is coming out this September, which is supposed to go better with the writing program I’ll be discussing next. The main difference is that they took out the redundant copywork that is also covered in the writing book.
If anyone has any suggestions on a good grammar book that might be more fast-paced and engaging, I’m all ears! Oh, I forgot I do have Painless Grammar Junior, which supposedly is meant for grade 3, and I do think we’d need at least one more year before we start that one. Oh, and I can’t wait to re-learn grammar myself, I used to love diagramming sentences. (Is that nerdy?) Anyway, it’s been such a long time and I think I forgot a lot. Am I putting apostrophes in the right place?
WRITING WITH EASE
For writing, we started The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease: Strong Fundamentals which also covers 4 years. I’ll refer to this program as WWE, everything has an easy acronym. Another very gentle and super easy-to-teach program. You’re supposed to do it four days a week and each week covers a piece of quality children’s literature. (We only do this two times a week.) The first day you do Copywork, writing a simple sentence, pointing out the sentence structure such as capital letters, end marks, capitalizing proper nouns, etc… You get a choice of two sentences, one very short and simple and the other a little longer.
The next day you read an excerpt from the literature and there’s a short series of questions your child answers in complete sentences. Then you ask her to narrate one thing she remembers from the story. All pretty easy, although I sometimes I end up reading the passage two times for her to answer the questions correctly. Her narrations started out as summarizing the entire passage, but lately we’ve gotten that down to one sentence, which is the point anyway when first starting out.
Here’s her copywork. You don’t need their student workbook, but I downloaded a PDF so I had them all printed out. You could just as easily use your own paper. Obviously Satori doesn’t pay attention to the lined paper they use.
I love getting the teasers of the literature they use as well as the practice listening and narrating. I do enjoy the copywork, but hope it will rub off soon in her own writing. I’m just not sure it’s enough in our particular situation. She just writes so much, I want to formally go over sentence structure with her. You’d think she’d understand what a sentence is after all this copywork, but she says she doesn’t understand what a sentence is when she writes on her own.
So in one of my next posts, I’ll talk about a new writing program we’ll be easing into this summer. I think we’ll still do Writing With Ease a few times a week.
During the time it took me to write this post, I got 3 pages of letters/drawings from Satori. She asked me what my teacher’s name was when I was a little girl, and then she presented me with “Your Old Class”, subtitled “Miss Osin” and a picture of me in a classroom with Miss Osin. Then she drew a picture of the Scooby Doo gang and they all had something to say about me. Daphne says “I think Angela is so prity!” Velma says “Angela is smart”. Shaggy says “Shes with me”. Scooby says “Shes a heerow!” Ah, a nice little laugh before bedtime.
