Language Arts Overview

An Overview of our Language Arts through the years of our Homeschooling Journey

There is so much contained in language arts that I feel I couldn’t possibly show everything that we do in one post. Instead, today, I’m going to try to give an overview of what language arts looked like as a whole over our many years of homeschooling. Through elementary school, the education of my two children looked very different. This is because we did not find Waldorf pedagogy until my son’s sixth year of homeschooling. I was looking for a math program for sixth grade when I found Waldorf geometry. It completely sold me to the beauty of Waldorf. Even though we do not follow all aspects of Waldorf in our homeschooling, it has heavily influenced our homeschooling since.

In this post you’ll find

Narration and Copy Work

One of the commonalities through all of our homeschooling with both children has been narration and copy work. We’ve used these tools for learning consistently with the exception of a year in middle school with my son. That year promptly presented to me the usefulness and need of these items in our schooling, particularly narration. In high school, we returned to using narration. Both narration and copy work evolved as we moved along in years. In the beginning, the narrations were oral and the copy work was short. As my children grew, so did our narration and copy work. Both became longer, more complex, and deeper studied.

Elementary School

Much of our language arts with my son’s elementary education was based on curricula that we used as curricula instead of using as sourcebooks. For introducing grammar, we used The Well-Trained Mind’s First Language Lessons Books 1 and 2. There are chants and songs that accompany these books which turned out to be very useful, especially the memorization of link/helping verbs and prepositions. From here we shifted to Michael Clay Thompson’s (MCT) language arts program. I love the visuals of the relationships for the parts of speech and parts of a sentence. I also love his play with words and his sentence analysis style. His workload is heavy if done in full, so we picked and choose which aspects to use.

For handwriting, we used Handwriting without Tears. It definitely had a whole-child approach with songs and movement interwoven into their curricula. With MCT and First Language Lessons, I would adapt them to be more play-oriented. For instance, when we were learning about verbs, I would have my children ask out various verbs like charades. When we were studying prepositions, I would have them show the relationships with themselves or with dolls.

For his literary studies, we were sure to read a great variety of literature – fiction and non-fiction, poetry, bibliographies, myths, fables, and fairy tales. We also sprinkled in some Brave Writer literature packets. He did take the beginning online writing class with Brave Writer, which gave us both a way to move through writing for the future.

My daughter’s language arts were more integrated in whatever block we were studying. There were a couple of language arts-specific blocks that we did at the beginning of a couple of years. I want to say those were third and fifth grades, but we may have done one in fourth as well. In addition to using MCT and First Language Lessons as sourcebook, not curricula this time, I added in Grammarland as a Read Aloud, and a silly sentence game that allowed us to play with the parts of speech.

We would study each part of speech one at a time. For each part of speech, we would choose a color of cardstock to represent that part of speech. We then came up with and wrote down as many as we liked examples of that part of speech on slips of paper of that color. When all the parts were studied and we had a collection of ‘cards’ for each part of speech, we began to play with them. We would start with what every sentence needed – a subject (noun) and predicate (verb). From there we would expand the sentence adding adjectives to modify nouns, adverbs to modify verbs, articles, interjections, and prepositional phrases. This kind of play helped us to learn, internalize, and use the material.

Middle School

Reading comprehension work was also added near the end of elementary school. I haven’t been able to source much material that I found did this well. We used Rooted in Languages Trees in the Forest. However, I would choose paragraphs from different sources that I wanted them to read. I would pre-read the piece and come up with some reading comprehension questions as well as pull out any vocabulary that I thought they might need. Before having them read the material, we would go over a quick overview of the title and glance at the work and any pictures. I went over a little of this in our last post about History. This works its way to 3-close reads in OER’s World History Project (high school level.)

Middle school had more in common for both children. I pulled from Rooted in Language for both of my kids. For my son, I used their Annotating Literary Elements and Trees in the Forest. For my daughter, I also added their Word Study Packet. These tools were added to the MCT work we continued and the narration and intentional copy work that we continued. For my son, copy work became his commonplace journal. This is a Charlotte Mason-style journal where you write your favorite quotes, prose, and other items. He would choose what he wanted to add to his journal each week.

After getting an overview, we would read the questions and go over any vocabulary. Then I would have my children read the piece. We finally would discuss the comprehension questions. This process was highly scaffolded similar to the copy work and narration that we did. It was also about this time that we began to do some note-taking skills. IEW’s level B intensive helped in this area by teaching note-taking for summarization. (I could not find the link for this.) For my son, in eighth grade, we spent an entire block going over how we learn and study skills that might aid us in that learning. This has proved very helpful, even going so far as to adapt how he worked through his college-level math classes for better retention of the material.

High School

My daughter is not in high school yet, but for my son, all these skills that he had studied earlier really started to come together. It was here that he learned how to read, analyze, and put together a cohesive opinion on a topic in an essay form. He had done simple five-paragraph essays in middle school. These, however, differed from his high school essays in that they were more analytical in nature. We worked through Help for High School with Brave Writer and parts of a book that I found, Teaching Argument by Jennifer Fletcher. This book was fabulous at illustrating what essays are – a conversation, discussion going back and forth. We also pulled heavily from the annotation portion of Rooted in Language’s Forest in the Trees. One valuable lesson that I learned from using these curricula, is that these exercises need repeating. Help for High School is written to last a semester, but we used it for a full year. You could easily use it for two years. Most of the exercises should be repeated for practice and mastery.

Something else that really helped my son in reading comprehension and writing was a history program from OER – The World History Project. Writing wasn’t overly emphasized with maybe 5 writing projects through the year, but it went over step-by-step what they were looking for in a good writing piece. In addition, they provided several analysis tools that built up to the writing. These tools included – contextualization (putting things in context,) comparison, and evaluating sources.

Grammar became part of the writing and foreign language experience. In this, I mean that we did not spend direct time on grammar itself, but talked about grammar in his writing. In corrections, it would come up. When thinking of using a variety of sentences, it would also come up. “We can start a sentence with a preposition phase. We combine sentences by using appositives. We can use a dependent clause to start a sentence.” If you aren’t there yet or don’t remember those things, don’t worry. You will learn them again as you go along. He was also exposed to a lot of formal grammar when studying Spanish. I think that might have been his greatest exposure to formal grammar. I was surprised to see how much English grammar is required when learning a foreign language.

Conclusion

That covers our journey so far. With this post, I’m also giving you a checklist of language arts ‘standards’ for each grade. I give this to you to use with the utmost adaptability and some caveats. What I mean here is that these are not the gold standard. If anything, they are meant to be adapted and used in a way that fits your needs; as a tool. I definitely don’t want them to be the other way around where the tool is using you. You will notice, with the exception of the spelling section, there is quite a bit of repetition. This is because there is some debate on when things should be taught and also how often it’s needed for mastery. That means that you might not need to cover everything in a given year. It also means you might need less or more of something in a year. Follow your child’s lead and use it in a way that works for your family. What I am hoping it does is take a little work off your hands and give you a template to work with to create something that works for you.

Video

Time Stamp

00:00 Introduction
00:42 Narration and Copy Work
00:43 Narration
03:10 Editing Process
05:37 Copy work
07:07 Poetry Tea Time
10:03 Elementary Years
10:26 Grammar
14:05 Parts of Speech Cards
17:28 Literature
18:50 Handwriting
20:38 Word Study
21:29 Poetry Analysis
22:41 Middle School
22:52 Writing and Spelling
24:14 Reading Comprehension
25:45 Literary Analysis
27:07 High school
27:54 Writing
28:29 Teaching Arguments
29:30 Reading Analysis
30:22 World History Project Tools
31:07 3-Close Reads
32:43 Conclusion